Contest: Design Our New Logo and Win $150!

A Crowdsource Design Site for a Crowdsource Mapping Site Logo

For the Your Mapper project, we decided to use an existing site to "crowdsource" the design of our logo. This means that we are starting up a paid contest to determine our logo. Anyone can contribute a design for free, everyone can vote for and comment on the designs, and to the winner goes $150 in cash!

Since our new site and service, Your Mapper, will be a community contribution data driven site, it's only fitting that we put our money where our mouth is an let the community decide on our new logo. We are using a site called 99Designs for the contest, since it has a great community of talented designers, and they've created some very interesting logos quickly.

Contest Link: http://99designs.com/contests/7184

We need the logo quickly, so the contest is only on for 3 days, and is over this Friday afternoon. For the next three days, people will be submitting designs and we will be commenting on and grading them along with the rest of the community. Everyone can build upon existing ideas and come up with something terrific.

I especially welcome everyone in the Louisville and Kentucky areas to submit their ideas, or at least vote and comment on what is submitted. And if you are outside the area, please participate as well - it's open to everyone.

To the contest winner we will give $150, credit on the new site, and a web link back to the designer's web page.

We see this as another great new media experiment (like our Twitter experiment) and hope that it works out for everyone. Get started now!

New Map: National Pollution Emissions from the EPA

We've got a new map up that shows 22,880 pollution sources across the entire United States from the EPA, collected in 2006, the most recent year available, and the total amount of pounds of pollution emitted.

http://www.metromapper.org/pollution-emissions.php


It's got a few new features going on, like auto-location based on your IP address, and our normal blue radius circle has been removed even though you still see the points closest to your address.

The data comes from their Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) that contains information on toxic chemical releases and waste management activities reported annually by certain industries as well as federal facilities.

Let us know what you think in the comments, and thanks to Amanda M for the suggestion!

New Feature: Bookmark, Email, and Save Your Favorite Maps

You can now bookmark your favorite maps and searches for later, and send them to your friends by email! At the top of our maps is a new option to create a bookmark, which takes a snapshot of your search address, filter options, and where you've zoomed, and saves it to your account. You can then bookmark it and send the link to others. They'll see the search and view you see.


In order to save your bookmarks, you'll need a free account. Register with us, and then when you login again, from any computer, you'll have all of your favorite bookmarks ready for you to view or email to others. Your account also lets you take any of our maps and put them on your own website or blog.

New Feature: Local Search Results on Maps

Built into each map is the new ability to search for anything you want (pizza, hardware, bars, groceries) and have the closest 10 results appear along with your Metro Mapper results! The search and results are an overlay on the map, so you won't loose what you are looking at. Then you can browse the results, see more, and even get driving directions.


Look for at at the bottom left each map.