Have the ads for the Census succeeded in incensing you? Are you keen to check up on your community, and if necessary berate your neighbors for not mailing back their forms? Yes? Then you will be pleased to know that the Census Bureau is providing a new, real-time color-coded map, to be launched today, of the mail-back rates for the 2010 Census count.

The prototype for the new map, which will track replies by state, county and town, is already on the Web in the form of a year 2000 Census version. That map is fairly easy to read and navigate. For starters, it provides shortcuts to certain views instead of leaving the user with the unwieldy distance-scale usually found on Google map API products. This bodes well for the 2010 version.

Some minor issues with the earlier version --- the fact that only one state at a time can show its counties in color-code, even if there are multiple states on display; the long load time for some of the data projections --- could very well be fixed with the launch of the 2010 version.

The Census Bureau has sunk hundreds of millions into advertising for this Census, in hopes that it will save taxpayers money by not having to chase down non-responders. This map will be a very obvious indication of whether the ads were money well spent.  The bureau is not shy about showing the figures from 2000, as well as its goals for improvement this year.  If the map for 2010 ends up being more filled with greens and blues than oranges and reds, they will have some explaining to do. 

View the 2000 Census map at http://2010.census.gov/2010census/2000map.

The 2010 version will presumably be linked from the Census homepage, http://2010.census.gov/2010census/    

Tsk, tsk, New Mexico! 

[UPDATE]

The map has launched—and it’s got some cool new features, if you can wait around for them.

In a continuation of the understated “friendly competition” theme suggested by the Census ads, a new start screen shows a box with the “Top 50” cities/towns/villages for participation rate, next to a blank national map with only the top five performing states colored in. The map can be tilted to reveal 3-D depictions of those five exemplary states reflecting their exact percentages with height. 

From the start screen you can then click through to an easy-to-use “Questionnaire Assistance Center Finder,” sort of like a for-dummies version of the store locators commonly used by retailers. 

You can also find the full participation rate map (via the button that says “View Participation Rates”), which is much like one from 2000, but with a couple new distance-presets, including one just for “Reservations.” 

The load times for the map are still sloooooooow for a user that wants to surf around, probably due mostly to the map software itself—as anyone who has tried to click-drag around on a zoomed-in Google map will attest. Add to that the extra caveat of retrieving and displaying daily-updated data for participation rates, and it is just not very quick. 

All in all, though, the whole enterprise is a decent Gov 2.0 effort from the recently-ambitious Census Bureau.  Now we wait to see if it was all worth it.