Ryan Schenk commented: "It'd be a million times more useful if that map was hooked into a timeline so you could see the spread.", which inspired me to knock together a timemap of swine flu. The timemap takes the RSS feed from niman's map and generates a timemap using Nick Rabinowitz's Timemap library.
Gotcha
Although in principle this should have been a trivial exercise (cutting and pasting into existing examples), it wasn't quite so straightforward. The Google Maps RSS feed is a GeoRSS feed, but initially I couldn't get Timemap to accept it. The contents of the <georss:point> tag in the Google Maps feed looks like this:
<georss:point>
33.041477 -116.894531
</georss:point>
Turns out there's a minor bug in the file timemap.js, which I fixed by adding
coords= TimeMap.trim(coords); before line 1369. The contents of the <georss:point> taginclude leading white space, and because timemap.js splits the latitude and longitude using whitespace, Google's feed breaks the code.Postscript
Nick Rabinowitz has fixed this bug.