Embedding GeoCommons in WordPress and Why Project Red is Important
May 25th, 2007by Sean Gorman
About the Author: Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users.
Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author
One of the goals with GeoCommons is to enable people to raise awareness about information – whether it is a cause, the news or just a promotion. Along those lines we’ve designed it so any of the data you find or load into GeoCommons can be syndicated, allowing anyone to raise awareness about the data in a context they think makes sense. One of the first syndication methods is some simple embedding code to drop any map in GeoCommons onto your blog or web page. We are working through the particulars of making it work with as many platforms as possible and we started with our blog WordPress. We had to do a few little tricks to get it to work and we’ll pass those along after we go live and hopefully have it all automated shortly. If nothing else hooray for no more screen shots on the blog 
So, what is the first map we embedded? AIDS deaths by country for 2005. With all the attention being produced by Project Red and other initiatives to combat AIDS in Africa we thought this map was an illuminating illustration of why the cause is important. The data comes from “The Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic 2006” – One look at why helping fight AIDS is an important issue.
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May 25th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
That’s a great map! I ‘m going to forward it to my wife’s team at USAID, who are in charge of the AIDs project. I am sure they’d love to access this map.