Ghost of Midnight

… about neighbors, community and Front Porch Forum

Neighborhood Mapping Tool

Posted on Wednesday, July 11, 2007 by 4 comments

Glenn reports on AnyGeo today…

Maponics, LLC announced today the full release of Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries™. Until now, websites offering local search, including social marketing, real estate and Web 2.0 sites, have had to provide search results based upon ZIP Code or city name. By integrating Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries, search results for hundreds of cities can now be filtered and even mapped by universally accepted city neighborhood boundaries. The result – more relevant local search results, more loyal site visitors and higher ad revenue. More about the dataset… Covering hundreds of the top US cities, the Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries database includes all latitude and longitude coordinates for each neighborhood polygon. It is specifically designed for easy integration into Google™, Yahoo!®, or Microsoft® map mash-ups or into back-end data analysis applications.

The idea of mapping by neighborhood is a very clever one and I believe offers amazing opportunities to the users of these data. Given the social and economic characteristics that residents of a “neighborhood” share this could indeed truly become a very powerful and useful data product… I can’t wait to see where this goes as we see apps developed based on neighborhood data. See www.maponics.com

Front Porch Forum has created polygons for neighborhood boundaries in our pilot area (Burlington, VT) and it’s more art than science.  Some are obvious to everyone, other areas defy consensus.

Posted in: Front Porch Forum, Local Online, Neighborhood


4 comments

  1. Hi Michael,

    Thanks for mentioning us here. Please note though, that Fractle maps is NOT selling the Maponics data. To keep this posting clean, I’ll avoid the gory details of all the misstatements they have made.

    Since we’re a Vermont company too, perhaps there are ways Maponics and Front Porch Forum can work together?

  2. Michael says:

    Thanks Darrin… and here’s the link to the recent Maponics-HomeGain press release about the data…
    http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/07/prweb539178.htm

    And, yes, we should talk!  I’ll send you a note.  -Michael

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