From Ben Tesch's del.icio.us feed comes a Flash application called "Iraqi War Fatalities." It shows deaths of Coalition personnel chronologically, marking them on a map of Iraq and Kuwait with small black dots and "tic" sounds. During times when the insurgency has been particularly troublesome (like the summer months), the ticking increases in volume. While it is common to hear people talk of Iraq as a low intensity conflict, this Flash animation does a good job of displaying the fact that people are constantly being killed there, despite the fact that their deaths are not always in the news.

That said, I wish it were possible to zoom in on the map. While Tim Klimowicz, the creator, admits that lack of information makes the locations of some of the black dots suspect, at the end of the presentation, you are left looking at small clumps of black dots. Zooming would also make it possible add more context to the presentation by "personalizing" each death. If I could hover over the black dots and see more information about whose death was represented, it would help alleviate some of Klimowicz' concerns about representing deaths with "little more than a tiny black dot on a computer monitor."