Sky News have reported on the heavy rain across Britain and used our map mashup to show some of the worst hit areas. This particular application shows the polygon feature - they have highlighted an area south of Rotherham which could be affected if the Ulley Dam bursts.

This is a great example of a breaking news story shown to good effect on the Puffbox map application.

I’ve been working away at the Google Map mashup tool that I developed for Puffbox and have added some functionality to it. Editors were already able to add / edit / delete points on a map with custom markers and custom information windows as well as run multiple maps. Now I have added polygon functionality. This means that an editor can draw custom polygonal shapes and place them on the map (useful for highlighting certain areas). A map can have multiple polygons in a range of colours, with or without solid borders. Editors can switch the polygons on and off for the end user, change colours and even add or delete vertices on the polygons (i.e. give the shape more corners or take them away). All this is done by simply clicking on the map to create corners or clicking a corner marker to delete it. It works on Firefox, IE and Safari and can get an interactive map with points and areas highlighted up and running in a matter of minutes.

Well, it only took a day for our map mashup to get results - a murder suspect featured in the Sky News Crime Uncovered week website map has been apprehended. I don’t think we could have got a better start - our first project has been picked up by a large satellite TV network, been the subject of several journalism blogs and made the streets safer.

Today the Google map mashup I made with Puffbox went live with the start of the Sky News Crime Uncovered week. They’ve used it show Britain’s most wanted criminals. The really clever stuff is going on behind the scenes where journalists with no specific technical expertise can add items to the map using a WYSIWYG content management system we developed.