An interactive map of Tea Party events on Meetup.com.

Chris Wilson at Slate.com has done something rather ingenious. He took data from Meetup.com and mapped it on Google maps over time to produce an interactive map of Tea Parties. This is a rather cool animation to watch regardless of personal politics.

I may have to devote some off-duty time to study and reverse engineer this. As a result of seeing what makes it go, perhaps we'll discover a useful application for ourselves or others. I've always wanted an animated map showing migration of families for genealogists. Hadn't thought of heat mapping births, weddings, or deaths. Hmmm...