Many Eyes Visualisations of Ireland

I've been looking for ways to display Ireland election or referendum results dynamically live interested in visualisations and mapping of info and web 2.0 here are the two combined, Many Eyes an Visual Communication Lab IBM research project.

Anybody can upload data sets from various sources and use the visualisation models to visualise the date in various ways from graph to word clouds to heat maps.

Somebody called Colm has upload and visualised many interesting data about population, houses, politics and GAA.

The Shifting of Ireland's Population to Dublin

A Data Set of Population by County

Compare Bertie election 2007 acceptance speech and his resignation speech a year later (switch between 1 or 2 words on the Many Eyes sites).

Its a pity it doesn't have Irish electoral constituencies of other administrative districts if any has the shapefiles for them please add them.

Google had visualisation API for heat maps now to but only maps and recognises individual countries or administrative areas at the moment as far as I can see.

Im going to see if i find or add Ireland administrative boundary geonames.

Microsoft live Mapcruncher and birdseye view let down by aerial maps

Mircrosoft has added a birdseye view to micrsoft maps for parts of Ireland,they are amazing but its strange how their aerial/sat maps are _awful_, they seem to have skipped a process and gone for the four angled birdseye views, but you might not think to look at the excellent quality birdseye view for central Dublin after seeing the quality of their aerial maps...

I use flashearth to compare or just go to googlemaps or Live maps

Here are the brilliant birdseye view of Dublin which you can turn to see from four different angles(only two angles further out from city centres).(Click images to open maps).

Liberty Hall and customs house in Googlemaps.

This is how far in I can view Dublin city center! in MS maps.live.com

The problem is it makes it quite difficult to add overlay with mapcruncher(as I explain below).

Microsoft Mapcruncher
Microsoft Live version of Googleearth and Googlemaps/mymaps, its been around for a while but is still in beta and of limited use with low resolution images for maps.live.com for Ireland.

You have to download a small program and then find the area of interest on the map then load the overlay image and match points in the two images so Microsoft knows where to overlay it and account for curvature of the earth and terrain etc.(This with Ireland's low resolution images which disappear if you try to zoom in too far).

You click render, it then splits the top image into tiles to overlay on the server maps (which seems unnecessary on small maps?). You need a web space where you can upload multiple folders and files optimally your own web domain.

Here I overlayed the current image of Dublin airport with what it will look like when the second runway is built.(Source)

See the map; Live maps: New runway for Dublin Airport Mapcrunch

Googlemaps Mapplets
Google have added photos and videos as direct options to overlay on googlemaps, so you can just view and area and see corresponding photos from flickr,panoramio etc, so you view photos like

or perhaps zoom into Croke park

and see videos taken by somebody (badly on their mobile phone) of some past-it rock band or even GAA if that's your sort of thing.

PS. A Canal Bank Walk by kregori