The flooding of the Red River is being actively covered by the news media in the US and overseas. There is no shortage of content including videos, photos and yes, maps. Our own clients such as StarTribune.com and Minnestota public radio created their own interactive maps of the flooding. But there is one map that stands out the most.

The editing team over at The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead (Inforum.com) publication created Red River flood map wiki and invited their readers to provide real-time flood information. As a result, a detailed map of the flood area quickly took shape. Users marked evacuation areas, shelter locations, road closures and other relevant information, making the Red River flood map wiki one of the most comprehensive maps of the diaster. In a three short days, the map was edited hundreds of times, received over forty thousand unique hits and generated over half of million map views! Clearly, real-time user-contributed content can be very effective in an emergency like this.

We have some great news, UMapper maps can now be seen on the Star Tribune website. Take a look at the Minnesota’s housing wastelands map to see it in action. Star Tribune is a great addition to the growing list of UMapper users including Boston.com, National Geographic, Palm Beach Post, Sacramento Bee and many others news websites.

We are excited to work With Star Tribune and are looking forward more great looking maps.

The Real Estate industry is one of the biggest user of maps on the internet as well as on our own website. This week’s feature is a real estate map by bfalk, used to sell a piece of property in Australia (check out http://imaging360.net for a complete listing). Although the map is simple it has a couple of nice design touches such as a custom icon and a highlighted property polygon.

The time for stylish maps has come. Seven cool new map styles from CloudMade are available in UMapper. In order to fit all of the styles, we had to break them down into two providers, here is the breakdown:

Styles contained in CloudMade (Stamen) provider
These styles were designed for CloudMade by Stamen design.

Styles contained in CloudMade (Standard) provider
Standard CloudMade and OpenStreetMap styles.

All of the above styles are currently live and ready to be used. As with any new release, we are looking forward to your feedback.

Following up on the release of the routing tool, we wanted to feature a map that was created using the new functionality. Running Map by runningwithdiabetes is a perfect example of a map drawn using our new routing tool.