World Map of billionaires

According to Forbes there are 794 dollar billionaires in the world. French mapping site I-Spirit has produced a Google Map showing the location of each of them . It is possible to filter the 794 billionaires by age or country.

One of the most glaring facts this map reveals is the north/south divide in the world's wealth. Of the 794 billionaires only 40 of them seem to live south of the equator.

The I-Spirit map comes with an option to embed the map in your own website or blog.

Google Maps mashup -- NZ Election Tracker

Today another New Zealand's popular news site nzherald.co.nz launches the election tracker, allowing you to find out where the leaders of the main parties are.

Using a Google Maps mash-up they've developed an application which shows where the leaders are and when. Click here to see the election tracker. This is a static Google map mashup, which is simply to use.

New Zealand Electorate Map

I have been developing a Google map mashup on New Zealand Election 2008. The election map below is 100% accurate boundaries data(data from www.stats.govt.nz), which contains 63 general electorates and 7 Maori electorates.This map widget helps voters figuring out which electorate they belong to by ticking the electorates and will be used for the election section of www.stuff.co.nz.

After researching some different methods of visualizing the data, the most reliable method utilises is Javascript with the Google Maps API , and Keyhole Mark-up Language (KML) to create a thematic map of the regions. There are a few limitations. Large KML files don't load in Google Maps, medium-sized files load very slowly—it seems Google is parsing the KML using Javascript.
Here is an example Australia 2007 Election, which takes 14.31 seconds, a significant initial loading time.