Two software engineers from Texas put up a website on Wednesday for people affected by the damage of Hurricane Katrina. They use a map from Google to help people pin down areas that were affected.
Users can leave comments about how these areas were affected and mark them on the map so those concerned can see exactly where they are talking about.
The uses for Google are just endless aren’t they? It is good to see that the company is able to provide a service that can really help people in a time of dire need.
So far, scipionus.com has had about 300,000 visitors, and over 600 tags have been left according to David M. Ewalt of Forbes.com.
“We all were watching the news and scouring the Web for any information we could get,” said Jonathan Mendez, one of the creators of the site.
“There were forums set up for people looking for information on particular areas, but they had hundreds of posts with mostly questions and little information, and it was hard to read through it all,” continued Mendez. “I kept thinking, ‘I wish there were a map with all this info, so it would be easy to look this up.'”
So Mendez and fellow software engineer Greg Stoll created scipionus.com to do just that using code from Google Maps software, which was made available to developers back in June.
If you have any information about the hurricane damage that may be helpful to people, you are encouraged to post it on the site. The site asks that you “do not add markers that ask for information, only markers that provide information”.
Chris is a staff writer for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
