Tim Warr’s Blog

Here in Austria smoking is still alive and well as well as a favourite pastime.  Bars still have that wonderful fug of smoke and smoking in offices is still fairly common.  So far anti-smoking legislation has been resisted (apart from the odd token gesture).

Seeing this Cincinnati Enquirer (Gannett) web mapping application made me realise how different ’smoking culture’ is between Austria and the USA.  In the column on the right hand side you can choose to see ’smoking complaints’  and display incidents, like ‘ashtray present’ and ‘Infiltration of Smoke’, on a map. 

If you are a more health conscious society, serious about a smoking ban, making information like this easily accessible must be one way to have impact. 

Oh, and BTW, this site just happens to be a very cool implementation of Virtual Earth.  More details on this here.