Mapping the spread of good practice by geocoding

One of the dimensions often forgotten when we're measuring the spread of good practice is place / geography. There is much theory about how messages spread location by location. If you're curious to provide visual mapping techniques to go along with your results charts, then geocoding is useful.

There are many websites that provide the ability to turn an address into its longitude and latitude reference, and then place a pin on a map to show where it is (geocoding). A new website is now available where you can map multiple places (show in groups to distinguish between the timing of an adoption of a good practice).

http://www.batchgeocode.com/ is where you can upload your addresses (a fun thing to do is to take your Outlook address book, file as they suggest and then upload - you get to see where in the world your contacts are!). A map is produced and you can then file this so you can embed it in a website or even create google earth files.

It is a one page process that is not difficult to do if you follow the directions carefully.

If you come up with ideas on how to use this in your improvement work then I'd love to hear about.