We recently received an e-mail from a company called VideoSurveillance.com, which sells (perhaps unsurprisingly) video surveillance equipment. They recently launched a web application that provides an interactive map of surveillance cameras in and around Portland. The idea is that residents who have been the victims of crime could use this information to determine if the activity was possibly caught on tape. Here’s their e-mail:

I wanted to pass along the message regarding a new Portland-based camera project that our company recently unleashed.  This new community-driven project called CommunityCam provides a map of the locations of public/private security cameras across Portland and its outlying areas. The map is crowd-sourced, meaning any resident, business owner, association, neighborhood group, or government organization, can add locations of surveillance cameras to help their neighbors.  People who experience crime can use the map to locate cameras that may have captured the activity and ask their neighbors…