I love sites that make publicly accessible data more usable. In the spirit of They Work For You comes chicagocrime.org, which features a number of cool features, including RSS everywhere and heavy use of Google Maps. Here’s an example of a specific crime that was reported. One of the coolest features is a dynamic map of Chicago (provided by Google Maps), which, using AJAX, can be used to show where various types of crimes occurred between specific dates. (So, for example, you can display all of the crimes committed at ATM machines last week on one zoomable map.) I’m not particularly interested in crime in Chicago, but the site is a monument to the types of things you can build by leveraging data and services that are freely available.
Check it out
May 17, 2005
rc3.org is a personal tech blog founded back in 1998. This post is one of roughly 10,000 published since then.