I do like a nice mashup and they are not just the preserve of techies as an ever increasing range of tools means the humble journo can mash with the best of them.

In that spirit I wanted to share a great post by Tony Hurst where he explains how you can  ‘Data scrape’ Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets to get a map like the one above.

[W]e have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a YahooGoogle map.

As Tony says ‘Kewel :-)’

It may sound arcane but don’t be put off by the seemingly techy.  Tony provides a reallu usable tutorial and the key thing is to experiment with data that’s relevent to you.

Go on, release the inner geek and have a play