Happy New Year to the Southern Ontario Elephant

Happy New Year to all!

Came across this post on the very excellent Strange Maps blog. Since I find myself residing  in the pits of the front legs, I thought this would be an appropriate way to start off 2009. At least I don’t live in Owen Sound. To quote:

Elephants are native to Africa and India and… Canada? Well, not really, but if you tilt your average north-oriented map of Ontario 90 degrees to the right, the province’s southern peninsula will show a more than passing resemblance to an elephant, tooting its trunk.

The full article can be found here.

Canadian Election Maps 2008

There are a couple of sites with maps of the 40th Canadian Federal Election, but not many that are really innovative. The best is probably the CBC’s map because you can see the riding boundaries and party colours, and zoom in with interactive results. The Globe and Mail’s map is pretty simple in comparison. My friend Tracey has written up a post over on datalibre.ca looking at several of the other contenders for displaying election results.

Google Earth Canadian Elections Map

Cedric Sam has created a Google Earth map application of all Canadian ridings as they were represented when Parliament dissolved and shows a variety of information, such as election history by riding and some Pie charts represent vote shares at the last general election. You can read about the details of how he put together this application on his blog.

Google Earth / Élection fédérale 2008 au Canada / 2008 Federal Election in Canada

Elections Map

Zoom in

Datalibre.ca is back from the dead

After getting hacked and being offline for a couple of months, datalibre.ca is back in action!

A couple of months back, datalibre.ca got hacked, Google delisted us, and our host shut us down.

I finally got around to doing a reinstall of wordpress, and replacing all the infected php file. Some twiddling left do do yet, but … we’re up and running.

Sorry for the glitch in service.  So we’re back to agitating for data freedom in Canada, to whit:

datalibre.ca is a group blog, inspired by civicaccess.ca, which believes all levels of Canadian governments should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. The data is collected using Canadian tax-payer funds, and we believe use of the data should not be restricted to those who can afford the exorbitant fees.