An interesting concept I found at the Visual Complexity website: A heat map of a city that highlights streets according to the frequency of mention the street gets in the media. It’s called City Murmur, which I believe is a very apt name. At the moment they have only done Madrid, and I’m not even sure if there are plans to take this any further. But it is another beautiful merge if geography with information. You can select the type (newspaper, blog, etc.) and theme (education, immigration, etc.) of media articles that have mentioned the streets.
Take a look at the very attractive website at http://madrid.citymurmur.org
The Nazmanian Devil 