Suburbified.com - Mapping Articles Of Suburban New York

Suburbified is the one stop location to learn about every single suburb around New York City. It’s always so difficult to keep track of all the different suburbs around the city particularly with so many resembling names. To solve this issue, suburbified.com has created a mash up using the New York Times API and then represented all the articles from the Real Estate section published on Sundays on a nifty map that you can easily navigate.

What suburbified.com has done to display the information is frankly quite good. They have created a colour coded key that indicates in which date the article was written. Currently, they have around 500 articles published on their site but the number is ever growing. This site really exemplifies the true power of a well implemented API and how they are helping to open up huge databases and display then in a way that just a few years ago was completely unthinkable! The impact that API’s can have on the internet is simply monumental and it shouldn’t be underestimated as a mere information borrowing tool since it enables much more than that.

'Each week the Real Estate section of the Sunday New York Times features a 'Living In' column, profiling one suburban outpost or New York City neighborhood. As a longtime Manhattan resident I would sometimes fondly read of the lush lawns and manicured SAT scores in these suburbs and exurbs, but I couldn't keep them straight. Is it Bellerose or Bellport that's close to the city? And which one is the bucolic Westchester village with the nuclear reactor? With the newly released New York Times Articles API, I built this to keep track, and maybe help you in your search for suburban sweetness. The 'Living In' articles were being written back in 1981, which is the earliest date the API can reference, but I kept it to the last ten years, as earlier would seem a bit dated for an accurate picture. The color of the dots on the map represent the date of the article. Red dots are the newest and orange are for 2001 and earlier, with gradations along the way. 2006 was a vermillion year. Of the 500 plus articles 230 or so were written about burgs outside of Manhattan, and some needed manual geocoding. Coming soon is Gothamized, with the rest of the articles on each neighborhood of New York City.'

They display information in a way that makes it more appealing to people.

Will people really want to come here very often? Wouldn't it be better if they linked this at websites from real estate companies?