Visual data: 2008 federal election on Google Earth

Stephen Taylor, a Conservative blogger who organized a series of rallies to protest last fall’s proposed coalition government, has created an extraordinary mashup of poll-by-poll results from the 2008 federal election and Google Earth.

The high definition (HD) video may take a few moments to load completely. Elections Canada provides the data that drives this extraordinary tool, but not in a format that Google Earth or Google Maps can read or import. Taylor crashed his computer several times coming up with a program to translate the data into a format Google could use.

Taylor’s creation will shade each federal poll result according to the party that won the poll, any given party’s share of the vote, or the voter turnout.

For the moment, Taylor has not released the KML file that would let Google Earth users play with the results of this project themselves. (KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language, the file format used to display geographic data in Google Earth and Google Maps.) But he is working on an application programming interface (API) that would let developers import similar data, such as the 2009 Nova Scotia election, into Google Maps.

Hattip: Michael Geist