I came across a useful post on the blog ouseful.wordpress.com. The blogger, Tony Hirst, blogs about whatever he finds interesting. He figured out a way to scrape the data off of Wikipedia using the Google spreadsheet function =importHTM(””,”table”,N).

The  blogger gives detailed instructions on how to extract a table containing population data from England using the Google spreadsheet function. He then uses Yahoo! pipes to geocode the data and create a Google mashup. It’s a very ingenious method of extracting limited datasets!

Another blogger, GoogleMapsMania, suggested using Batchgeocode to get the latitude and longitudinal data and then applying that data in the Google Spreadsheet Map Wizard to map out the data

-Lyndie Chiou