Promises promises.

It's been a while since I posted something. Which is very bad practice. I still have some semi-amusing anecdotes in the works, but I've largely spent the past few days working on some things in Flex.

While wacked out on cold meds, I was checking out Flowing Data's Walmart Growth Visualization and playing with Modest Maps. I know most of my posts here generally fall into two categories: nonsensical anecdotes or emphatic epiphany. This post qualifies as the latter.

I was beginning to think about creating a map of Atlanta that featured nothing but strip malls. And as a level of granularity, 3 or 4 of the strip malls I've been targeting and visiting could be clicked to follow through as case studies, complete with my brilliant observations about pigeons, urine stenches and subjective perspectives of the city image.

So as a macro view, you would have a city rendered as a collection of one its most complex elements: the shopping node. Everything else would be left to the ether, emphasizing the invisible elements of the city, letting the opacity of ellipses scream through the map. As a micro view, I hope to provide users an idea of how varied and integrated the image of the shopping node (strip mall) is.

Emphatic epiphany indeed. I really like this idea, because until now this project has basically been a bucket of gruel in my head. Every so often I would dig in with a spoon and pull out a tasty chunk. Now, the gruel has been processed into a delicious idea sausage casing. Have I pushed this metaphor too far? Yes. More soon.