Friday, 24 August 2007

Daily Telegraph mashup up A Level results and Google Maps

Thanks to the Online Journalism Blog for finding this Google Maps / A Level results mash-up.


It shows great diligence on the part of the DT (whose explanation can be found here) and gets "A for Effort" from me.

But actually I don't think that in this case it adds much to the story or the user experience other than being a bit of a gimmick. I suppose if you had a sudden desire to know the A Level performance of schools in Altrincham area, this would be one way of doing it.

But I think it's an unusual enough approach to get attention, so that's a good enough reason for doing it.

And hats off anyway to an old media publishing enterprise for not feeling it has to do everything itself when there are better tools around than it could build for itself.


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2 comments:

Anthony said...

Seems to be a case of image over substance - now if they'd altered the tags by say, average grade attained so you could see the distribution of results across geography regions we'd have something worth doing...

Andrew Orange said...

Indeed Ant, but full marks to them for experimenting. Puts them way ahead of most of the newspapers.