Leave it to Google to take a regional disaster and make a slick web 2.0 web app about it.
The Big G is working with the L.A. Times and Twitter to highlight the billions of fires in the area. The map has clickable fire icons for the L.A. and San Diego area, each showing the percent containment, damages, possible origins, and other pertinent information.
The information’s useful, and the map helps put into perspective just how far-reaching these fires are.
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Credit for the San Diego map really needs to go to those who created it, local public radio station KPBS. Google didn’t create the fire map.
from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15655316
“Online Managing Editor Leng Caloh relied on My Map, a fairly new application from Internet search engine Google. People usually use My Map to pinpoint things like the best places to play golf or get a drink.
“The playing that a lot of us on the team do in our free time has been the key to our success,” Caloh said.
Caloh and KPBS created a virtual map of Southern California speckled with symbols showing — down to the block – what had burned, where to find shelter, what roads were closed. It was persistently updated and became authoritative.
Even the state fire agency’s Web site linked to KPBS.
That map has now been viewed more than 1.2 million times.
“It’s really amazing that they managed to do this,” said Google’s My Map Project Manager Jessica Lee. “I know they’re a small, shoestring operation. But if you give people the tools and the technology to do this, they’ll do it.”
KPBS also set up an account on the social-networking Web site Twitter to funnel text updates of just a sentence or two to subscribers on mobile phones. About 1,000 people took the feed.”