A coworker of mine thought of a great way to visualize a lot of the data we work with in our user-end applications, but we're not aware of many available sdk's or apis that hook in.

We're trying to recreate in essence, the "Magic-Wall" of CNN. We would like to be able to show trends across the country in a 'heat-map' kind of way, and be able to drill down into a state to show those same trends across counties. We don't need the move-states-all-over-the-place functionality that the commentators loved to use.

We're aware of Mappoint, but more research needs to be done if its capable of what we require.

Would it make more sense to just try and roll our own? Has anyone else tried something along these lines? The only problem I can see is defining the boundaries for each state, or by county on the state-level.

Thoughts? Ideas?