Every so often I revisit the idea of browsing a collection of documents (or specimens, or phylogenies) geographically. It's one thing to display a map of localities for single document (as I did most recently for Zootaxa ), it's quite another to browse a large collection.

Following on from my previous post about Wikispecies (which generated some discussion on TAXACOM) I've played some more with Wikispecies. AS a first step I've added a Wikispecies RSS feed to my list of RSS feeds. This feed takes the original Wikispecies RSS feed for new pages (generated by the page Special:NewPages ) and tries to extract some details before reformatting it as an ATOM feed.

Tweets from @ attilacsordas and @stew alerted me to the Google Map of the H1N1 Swine Flu outbreak by niman. Ryan Schenk commented: "It'd be a million times more useful if that map was hooked into a timeline so you could see the spread.", which inspired me to knock together a timemap of swine flu. The timemap takes the RSS feed from niman's map and generates a timemap using Nick Rabinowitz's Timemap library.

Time for some fun. In between some tedious text mining I've been meaning to explore some visualisations of NCBI. Here's the first, inspired by Jörn Clausen's wonderful Live Earthquake Mashup (thanks to Donat Agosti for telling me about this). What I've done is take all the frog sequences in Genbank that are georeferenced, add the date those Genbank records were created, generate a KML file, and use Nick Rabinowitz's timemap to plot the KML.