Stuart Pinfold

"Due to Technical Problems..." - My blog

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Updated BBC Correspondents Map now online

29 September 2008 at 13:26

At the start of the year, I designed and developed the BBC Correspondents Map, which pin-pointed the base locations of all BBC News' (and some World Service) bureaux, correspondents and stringers.

The response to the map has been amazing: Journalism blogs have linked to it, journalists have criticised it, BBC Backstage featured it, mapping sites liked it, Ariel (the in-house staff newspaper) wrote about it, The Guardian copied it, the Red Cross made it into an education exercise, and even the BBC's dotlife and Google's Lat/Long blogged about it.

So, why change it?

I've been told that in order for it to appear on Gateway, the BBC's intranet, it must use Microsoft Virtual Earth technology, not Google Maps. We can have an argument forever about how "locked in" to Microsoft technology the BBC is, but ultimately I wanted the map on the intranet, and therefore had to change the API.

The result is I've had to code a complete design overhaul, due to MSVE's 'info bubbles' being a lot smaller than Google Maps'. However, it means the application has been re-invented, and I have new-found energy for developing and designing new features.

So, for now, it has the same functionality (but a different design) to the original mash-up, but expect to see more features as soon as I can get my head around MSVE.

Click here to access the new-design BBC Correspondents Map.

(Comments are closed for this post; to comment on this blog post or the Correspondents Map, please leave a comment on the original blog post.)

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