Compare USA to Other Countries

World travelers and students of world affairs should like this Google mashup, "If It Were My Home".  Compare country size and statistics for USA vs Afghanistan, Argentina, or any country in the world.  If you love visuals, this is a good way to look at comparison statistics.  

The site also helps you visualize disasters like the 2010 Pakistan flood or the BP oil spill. 


The site was designed by Annette Calabrese and developed by Andy Lintner.

Google Wave - Spelly, Linky, Rosey, and More Magic

Watermole, an early member of the CSLA 2.0 Team (Summer 2007), actively updates her blog with news of cool new tools. I regularly follow 2.0 Team blogs, so her blog alerted me to a developer preview or pre-launch introduction of Google Wave at the Google I/O Conference, May 28, 2009. The video is about an hour and a half, but well worth watching. See below.

Highlights: Google Wave, an open source personal communication and collaboration tool.

• Developers are two brothers who designed Google Maps several years ago. Lars and Jens Rasmussen, as well as project manager Stephanie Hannon preview the amazing product, platform, and protocol.
• The open source software product will launch later this year.
• Features include a slick spell-checker (Spelly), ability to detect and add links as you write (Linky), language translator that translate as you write (Rosey), and much more.
• A "playback" feature allows you or a new person that is added to a discussion to start back at the beginning of an edited discussion or collaborative document.
• "Click and drag" attachments and people to add to a document or discussion.
• Wave extensions extend the functionality. Examples of external APIs include a fun "yes/no/maybe" gadget for a group to use to make decisions, games like collaborative chess and sudoku games -- "playback" feature can be used here, too!
• Wave can be integrated with existing applications like Twitter.
• Issue tracker (Buggy) can be used to track and correct software bugs. [This sounds useful for regulatory and public affairs issue managers.]
• ALL THIS IS WHAT IS POSSIBLE IN THE BROWSER.
  

NOTE: Here is what Lerdof (Lars) Rasmussen said regarding using open source software in education in an interview with Builder Australia a few years ago: "It makes no sense to base an educational system on property software. All you are doing is generating new customers for a company as opposed to creating the people that might be the next Microsoft. For example if you have a database course, use an open source database and show them how the database works. Not everyone is going to dig into the guts of this thing, but there will be two or three kids in every class that will, and from what they will learn they can build the next great database. It's crazy when educational systems don't go with open source and go all Microsoft. That is where governments really should be pushing universities."

ZeeMaps Powered by Google

Today, I learned to upload thousands of YMCA locations into a map thanks to ZeeMaps at ZeeSource, an open source company. I knew how to add one location at a time on Google Maps, but needed to learn how to add hundreds or thousands of locations. In order to do that, you need geocoded information in one of two forms:

• a database with longitude and latitude information or
• an excel spreadsheet in CSV format.

I learned about comma-separated values or CSV format. Using an excel spreadsheet of YMCA locations, I "saved as" in CSV format. CSV format does not allow for the following puctuation marks: " . , [ ] ( ) so I did a "find and replace" to eliminate unwanted marks. Early on, I sent an e-mail question and got an immediate response from the founder of ZeeSource, Pankaj Garg.

Next, I created my map! There is a menu bar to explore:

• Map - create, name, describe
• View
• Additions - Upload CSV file
• Edit Grids
• Deletions
• Customizations
• Print or Share
• Settings

Now to identify databases to pull information that would make an impact when visually displayed. Ideas that come to mind include: school equity issues such as schools that have no teacher librarians or subscription databases. Any other good ideas?