I always sort of wondered what all the hubbub about “AJAX” and “Web 2.0” were, so when my viz class assigned us to build an apartment finder thingy based off of data scraped from craigslist, I decided to do it using the Google Maps API. It uses all the buzzwords: DHTML, Javascript, XML, Asyncronous RPC. Turns out all this stuff isn’t new at all, it was just waiting for someone (read: Google) to show that it could be done well. Anyway, if you want to see the fruits of my labor (still in progress) they’re here.