IBM Blog Map

I’ve been playing with doing a Google Maps mashup on IBM’s internal blog system, showing where all the bloggers are posting from. It actually turned out to be pretty simple. We have an LDAP directory (called Bluepages) which stores information about all employees, including their work location. Another system stores information about each work location, such as longitude and latitude of the sites. That means I can get a grid reference for every user’s base location and plot them on the map. It’s not perfect, some people don’t actually work at their base location, but it gives a good approximation.

Blog Mashup

Clicking on the map pins lists all the bloggers who have recently posted at that location. I’ve got a few ideas of how to improve it and eventually I’d like to publish a live version of it outside the firewall. I don’t think there’s anything confidential in it, as I’m not going to show any blog content, but there may be some privacy issues around people’s IDs. I think it’d be nice to show IBMers activity throughout the day though.

One thought on “IBM Blog Map

  1. Awesome, now I can actually see where those IBM locations in the US are that I hear of all the time 😉

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