One of the great abilities of online news is its use of info-graphics to tell a story. Want to know who has controlled the Middle East throughout history? This map can give you a 90-second run down. Curious how many soldiers have died in Iraq and from what country; check this map out (click the U.S. button on the right on and off for the full story).

But a true interactive map doesn’t just let you click buttons and watch a flash video. It makes a call out to the masses to share their unique knowledge of local geography, making everyone’s understanding of the world better.

With Google Earth you can fly across the world (humming airplane noises if you wish) with simple mouse clicks. But with another click you can access Google’s community option, unleashing thousands of little “i” buttons that share intimate knowledge about very precise locations. These little tidbits, which can be about everything from subway stops, where people have been mugged, good local bakeries and where earthquake fault lines run, have been put into the map by regular people who want to contribute to our geographic insight.

This is one example of neogeography, but there are others, like Platial, that ask everyone to contribute general knowledge of areas to create collective maps. These maps are great if you want to learn more about a city, but for our purposes they tend to lack something significant - news value.

Gawker has a map mash-up called Gawker-Stalker, where readers report on the whereabouts of celebrities, giving everyone up to minute paparazzi style news. I’m not suggesting NewAssignment.Net go that route, but the fact that Gawker also has created the subway smell map shows that the medium is flexible. Gawker is able to report real time news by receiving information from citizen journalists.

Assuming that we don’t want to follow celebrities or smells, the question is — what kinds of investigations can NewAssignment.Net do with these mash-up maps that is unique and really captures the spirit of networked journalism?

I’ve asked Mark Johnson, environmental guru at Netscape, to describe how he uses Google Earth to investigate illegal deforestation around the world, something anyone with a computer can contribute to. You can read about it here.

David Cohn is the test editor at NewAssignment.Net