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.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 8:10 am and is filed under Map of the Week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.