yeah I had to geocode the complaints by address and separate them by type/date/code, and that took a little longer than usual since the excel data wasn't designed to be plugged right into GIS, some of the addresses didn't exist etc. you're right that I used census data, but displaying census data is always tricky if someone hasn't already made the specific dataset you want, and the census bureau doesn't do that yet. I said started because that was the last thing I did before I left, and we weren't really sure what to do with the information
philageohistory.org is also nice
idk what I last told you but I'm in landscape architecture btw. GIS is kind of an innately LA thing, since as you might have learned it was born out of Ian McHarg's concept of suitability analysis for landscape architecture. the first of jim's unknown number of degrees is in LA too
know nothing about RSS feeds, nothing about free suites sorry!! i just loove maps!!!

I wouldn't know what the fuck a GIS was after these guys nerding out over it (no offense)
google earth/maps is kind of like a really user-friendly version of it.