Web editor Patrick Cain's weekly map looking at life in the GTA and beyond.

http://thestar.blogs.com/maps/

"... I’ve been working at the Star as a Web editor since 2001.

In 2005, colleagues Brett Smith, Chris Carter and I started to explore the
possibilities of the Google Maps API as a news tool for thestar.com:

We had one of the first homicide maps
http://www3.thestar.com/static/googlemaps/starmaps.html?xml=homicides.xml
on a North American news Web site, in early 2005. Later, we started
mapping home towns of Canadians killed in Afghanistan
http://www3.thestar.com/static/googlemaps/starmaps.html?xml=afghan_dead.xml
and marijuana grow houses
http://www3.thestar.com/static/googlemaps/starmaps.html?xml=growops.xml
busted in the city. We were the first in the city to link to live traffic
camera images
http://www3.thestar.com/static/googlemaps/gtatraffic.html?xml=trafficcams.xml
on an interactive map.

Our splash page for the last provincial election
http://www3.thestar.com/static/googlemaps/electionmaps.html?xml=2007_ontario.xml
was built around a Google Map, which for the first time displayed
polygons, or two-dimensional shapes.

For all that, we’ve barely scratched the possibilities of the medium,
which brings us to Map of the Week. The concept is that the weekly maps
will work as stand-alone features, not necessarily connected to a story or
to content in the paper, though opportunities to link them would be
exploited as they arise, as I expect they will. ..."