Hotmap: Looking at Geographic Attention
by Danyel Fisher

From the abstract:

Online interactive mapping systems are growing in popularity: Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo[***] all offer interactive maps, with varying features and qualities of aerial photography. For the maintainers and designers of such systems, the behavior of users can provide critical cues on how both to improve their offerings and understand how users are now interacting with the system. The tools needed to track user data for these systems are different from the traditional tools of log file analysis.

Direct to Full Text (8 pages; PDF)

You can explore Hotmap at http://hotmap.msresearch.us/

Source: Microsoft Research

See Also: Other Sources for Heat Maps that Help Visualize Data include:
+ SmartMoney’s Map of the Market
+ Trulia Home Sales Maps
+ Zillow City Heat Maps

*** Ask.com where Gary is Director of Online Information Services offers several interesting and useful features with its map and local search products. For examples, with Ask Maps you can watch your directions (both driving and walking directions) dynamically change as you move pointers or “pins” to new locations. Ask Maps also provides aerial imagery.

At Ask City you can draw a circle, line, etc on the map and then “search inside” the specific area you’ve marked-up. You can also embed these maps on blogs and web pages.

See Also: How We Watch the City: Popularity and Online Maps
Another paper by Danyel Fisher.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 and is filed under Geographic, Info Management and Retrieval, Information Science, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.