Morisy.com

I have now spent a long, long time getting acquainted with the wonderful OpenHeatMap, a delightful project by Pete Warden that easily lets you map your data sets against not only maps (as the name would apply) but also time.

If you use the website's "hosted version," the whole thing is a snap. Just upload your CSV or Excel document, or link in a Google spreadsheet, tweak a few knobs, and you are off and running. If you want to host it yourself, however ... There's a few speed bumps along the way. And as far as I can tell, no one outside of Pete and myself has really done it yet.

Now first off, Pete's done a great job and the Github documentation is pretty good given the project's infancy. But I banged my head on a lot of points that hopefully others can avoid, because I couldn't find any non-Pete written documentation or reviews anywhere.

So here we go: Michael's caveats and warnings when using OpenHeatMap.

Gail Robinson, editor in chief of the Gotham Gazette, and Amanda Hickman are two of my new journalism heroes. With a Knight Foundation grant, they've been creating a series of news games, which they're in the process of open sourcing. Switch is kind of a basic game that has players pick cards at random until they can successfully match them, Memory-style.

Balance!, however, is a bit more interesting: It lets players try to balance NYC's ominous budget through the downturn, and compare their results with Mayor Bloomberg's. Users can then submit their budgets, providing a quick, graphical way to understand the sacrifices being made, and outlining some of the basic challenges with cutting each area.

The Flash game is open source and available on Git Hub, and Amanda's promised that other journalism games will also be posted there in the future.