A neat and useful data mashup comes courtesy of the folks at ProPublica ("Journalism in the public interest"): Google Maps meets a database of homes with Chinese tainted drywall.

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You gotta love real journalism (which some of us remember). While "about 3,500 homes" is what you’ll commonly hear when reading about the effects of the drywall (it comes from the Consumer Product Safety Commission)…

ProPublica and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune compiled a list of addresses from county property appraiser data and records in consolidated lawsuits filed in New Orleans federal court and found nearly twice that number: around 6,900 homes.

They took the CPSC’s data plus their own, popped it into Google Maps, and presto — a simple tool for finding affected homes.