Mapping the Olympic Medals
Click on the Map to Find the Gold (Silver and Bronze too)
Who's got all the gold? Well its certainly not a little man in a funny green hat, but it looks like the rainbow is footed transcontinental with its ends surely planted in the United States and China. The Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) in Redlands, CA has posted an interactive visualization that allows you to investigate the distribution of Olympic Medals (Gold, Silver, and Bronze) among the participating countries in this summer's London Olympics. ESRI is the developer of the proprietary industry software standard for digital cartographic analysis and visualization, ArcGIS.
The Map uses a feed from cloud server application platform, heroku.com, that captures and feeds medal statistics into the map. Cloud computing has become a popular streamline service for business in the past couple years basically providing computing and storage as a online service. With the statistics being provided via cloud this visualization of the Olympic Medals operates smoothly and updates dynamically as the medals get reported to the feed from the London Olympics.
When you click on a country it will take you to that country's page on the 2012 London Olympics website. You can keep track of each country's Olympic Medals and read about recent wins all day. Keep updated and check back to watch that radius around your favorite country grow.