Armed with a stack of house-listing printouts from Craigslist.com, a popular website, Paul Rademacher was driving around Silicon Valley late last year looking for a place to live. It was not until he was about to park that he looked up and realised he had already visited the same house earlier. Surely, he thought, there had to be a better way to evaluate and visualise a list of housing options. And so there was. In February, Mr Rademacher—who by day was a software engineer at DreamWorks Animation-began building a website that combines the mapping capabilities of Google's search engine with housing listings from Craigs-list. The result, HousingMaps.com, creates maps showing houses or apartments in a particular city within a designated price range. The site went live in April, and is a leading example of one of the latest internet trends: the web mash-up. HousingMaps instantly attracted a crowd and has since been visited by more than 850,000 people.
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