A few months ago I introduced Bill Wendel, author of the Real Estate Cafe blog, to the folks at Platial, which does a terrific user-annotated online mapping product. Bill had come to a Berkman Center session where I talked about various methods of doing citizen journalism, and I’d shown several mapping sites.
He immediately got how important this can be, and has been working hard to create a site that takes advantage of the genre.
Now take a look: The Real Estate Bubble Map is exactly the kind of thing I think Web mashups can do best.
There are potential problems with this, such as gaming by people who don’t like what he’s doing or who just like to wreck things. But careful attention can fix such problems.
Bill will be at our Citizen Journalism unconference next Monday. We’ll make time to showcase this project.
on Dec 8th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
[…] RealEstateBubbleMap.com, an experimental wiki authorized users can edit, will be presented as a case study Monday at an Un-Conference on Citizen Journalism at Harvard. Before then, we invite you to post additional properties to the Boston bubble map if you live locally, or create your own local bubble map if you live in one of the 71 "extremely overvalued" housing markets nationwide. If there is interest, we’ll host a Bubble Hour chat or conference call before, during, or after the presentation Monday for local clients, or real estate bubble bloggers and their readers nationwide. Email us at RECafe@mac.com if you would like to participate. […]