A PhD student (Imran Haque) from Stanford University has created a neat application harnessing Google Earth and US Census data. gCensus is the resulting website and application that provides a way to access geographic data freely without having to use a GIS software package. It only provides limited data presentation of three states currently because of the large data sets, but he has made this project an open source project, so over time, the amount of data available to be displayed will grow. A article detailing the initial project development can be found on ExtremeTech. Now if only we could get something like this in Canada…

A gCensus map of the population per block in Berkeley, CA.