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This project has ended. I am leaving the Star to pursue another opportunity, and my last day is today.

Thank you for your interest, and your patience as I slowly figured out the technology.

The blog itself had a total of about 1.4 million lifetime page-views, and you left just under 1,000 comments.

I would like to thank Star editors Neil Sanderson and Marissa Nelson, whose early support was essential to the project; Sanjay Singh, whose advice revolutionized the way I create maps; my wife Catharine Tunnacliffe, who was a source of enthusiasm and fresh ideas when my own waned; and the Information and Privacy Commissioner's investigators, whose careful and fair-minded handing of disputes was very helpful - several maps would not have been published without their help. I filed a total of 53 access-to-information requests for Map of the Week.

The access-to-information process can sometimes be antagonistic, but much more typically I found myself dealing with public servants who were interested and enthusiastic about the project, and often had not seen their own agency's data mapped.

I can be contacted through patrickcain.ca.

Here are some highlights of the last few years:

	Bedbugs Reports of bedbugs form a surprising pattern across the map of Toronto. Link to the map
	Organ donor registry A look at Ontario’s organ donor registry shows that Toronto has the lowest rates in the province. Why? Link to the map
	Toronto Centre by-election A detailed, fully interactive poll-by-poll look at the Toronto Centre by-election shows the voting patterns of this unique riding. Link to the maps
	Childbirth A map series looks at aspects of childbirth in the GTA, from homebirth to maternal age. Link to the maps
	Same-sex marriage What neighbourhoods do same-sex married couples come from? Two maps show how patterns differ between men and women. Link to the maps
	The Riverdale First World War project About 200 residents of Riverdale were killed in the First World War. This home-by-home map hints at the scale of a neighbourhood’s trauma. Link to the map
	Infectious disease Reports of infectious disease, broken down by the patient’s postal code, show TB, hepatitis and several STDs. Link to the maps
	Dog ownership Over 20 maps look at everything to do with dog ownership in Toronto, broken down by postal code. Link to the maps
	Impaired driving Where are Ontario’s worst postal codes for impaired driving charges? These maps will show you. Includes age graphs of drunk drivers. Link to the maps
	Real estate A growing and popular series of maps tracks trends in the GTA’s real estate market. Link to the maps
	Street racing A map of drivers charged with street racing shows very different patterns from the drunk driving map. Why so many in Caledon? Link to the maps
	Passports A map of rates of passport holding shows some revealing patterns. Link to the map
	Historic map overlays 1878 maps overlay the modern streetscape of Toronto, and the present Pearson airport site. Link to the maps
	Gun ownership A map series looks at gun ownership in the GTA by postal code. Link to the maps
	Neighbourhood crime maps A growing series of crime maps based on City of Toronto-defined neighbourhoods. Link to the maps
	Neighbourhood project We asked readers to define their Toronto neighbourhoods. This was the result. Link to the maps
	Smoking Maps show smoking patterns regionally in Ontario and in the GTA by census tract. Link to the maps
	Military recruiting Which neighbourhoods do the GTA’s military recruits come from? Maps break it down by postal code. Link to the maps
	Traffic safety Maps using a year’s worth of pedestrian and cyclist accidents show where Toronto’s danger spots are. Link to the maps
	Education Maps look at admission to the six campuses of the GTA’s three universities, and at where Toronto high school dropouts live. Link to the maps
	Agriculture Where farms have been lost in Ontario over the past ten years. Link to the map

Catching up, and maps elsewhere

First, here's the project I was working on the other week instead of a weekly map: a Google Earth video of the main Olympic venues, narrated by multimedia editor Scott Simmie. Making a Google Earth video of somewhere in British Columbia is about twelve times as much fun as anywhere else, for reasons that will become obvious. Mouseover the image to start:

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A paper forwarded by reporter Vanessa Lu shows maps of concentrations of artists and cultural workers by postal code in Toronto, as well as Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. (Toronto starts on page 42.)

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Former deputy managing editor Catharine Tunnacliffe sent a link to a blog post mapping Facebook relationships in the United States, showing how intensely regional they are. I'd be amazed if a Canadian version didn't look similar.

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Also, I should mention the Star's photo blog, a group effort by our photographers, which for my money is one of the better things we've ever done on line.

Photographer Steve Russell has a recent post on how (and why) male figure skaters' faces can look very, very strange:

1,000,770

Map of the Week had its millionth page view overnight, making it the fourth Star blog to go into seven figures.

Map of the Week

will appear next week.

Knight-Batten Awards

This blog was listed as a notable entry recently for the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, further explained here. Other entries in that category included demotix.com, which played an important role during the aftermath of the Iranian election in getting freelance images to the West, and the Associated Press’s Flash-based Economic Stress Index map, which measures economic strain by U.S. county.

The full list can be found here.

The grand prize was won by six major online projects produced by the New York Times, including this very compelling one (note the tabs):

750,153

This blog's lifetime page views broke the 750,000 mark just now. This measures hits on the blog itself - hits on the XML files that house most of our maps are separate, and would add to that total.

The best, as they say, is yet to come.

Housekeeping

- Herb at ibiketo.ca overlays the KML file from our bike accident map on a map of density of cyclists by census tract: link. The map was also discussed here and here.

- The blog’s lifetime traffic is just under 570,000, or about 1,760 hits a day as a lifetime average. Recent traffic has been higher – for April so far, we have been getting an average of about 5,100 hits a day.

400,000

Somebody this morning, as far as I can tell looking at a street racing map, gave this blog its 400,000th hit.

Map of the Week

will return next week.