The Google Maps of the Week

Storymap is a charming Google Map that captures the personality of Dublin city through Ireland’s age-old tradition of storytelling, presenting a vision of Dublin as told through its stories and storytellers.

Storymap takes advantage of the Dubliners' love of telling a good tale by presenting the city through the stories of the local people. The map is a collection of videos in which Dubliners tell stories about locations around the city. The stories range from a deadly gunfight between students at Trinity College Dublin and a college porter to the strange tale of the first cat to fly across the Irish Sea.


Trulia has launched a few new visualisation options to their real-estate Google Maps. The new options allow users to view average rental prices in different neighborhoods and to view earthquake and flooding risks across cities.

To view the new map views visit Trulia Local and use the menu panel on the left-hand side of the map. The Rental Prices option allows the user to view a heat map of rental rates, showing the average cost-per-bedroom at the neighborhood level over the last year.


I've recently spotted a number of maps in the wild using hexagonal binning to visualise data. The Sacramento Bee map of Six Years of Sacramento County Homicides is the first time I've seen it being used with the Google Maps API.

The map shows homicides and assaults with a firearm, or shootings, reported to Sacramento police and sheriff's deputies from 2007 to 2012. Homicides on the map are represented as dots. The hexagons are used to display the number of shootings in defined regions on the map.