April 2006
- Non-Mapping Blogs That Nevertheless Have Map Content from Time to Time
- A big change from a year ago is that there are an awful lot of blogs about cartography, mapping and the geospatial industry: I list a bunch of them in the directory (which needs another update, I think), and there…
- Cartography Turns One
- Blog anniversaries are breaking out all over; I guess a lot of mapping blogs had their start in 2005, and those that have stuck it out for long enough are now able to mark their first-year milestones. Cartography turned one…
- Historical Celestial Atlases on the Web
- If you’re interested in antique celestial atlases, you’ll want to bookmark Historical Celestial Atlases on the Web, which provides links to a number of online reproductions of old star atlases. Via La Cartoteca. See previous entries: The Face of the…
- Australia on the Map, 1606-2006
- Australia on the Map, 1606-2006 is a web site that commemorates the 400th anniversary of the first charting of Australia by European explorers. For our purposes, the neatest part of the site is five scans of early maps of Australia…
- Question: Software for Cartograms?
- S. P. Low from the University of Singapore, looking for software to make cartograms, writes: We are working on a project that attempts to track the global construction market using cartograms, such as those rectangular cartograms used by the World…
- Neogeography
- I must confess that I haven’t yet taken a very close look at Platial.com, a web site built on the Google Maps API (see previous entry), so it was only via this National Geographic News article about mashups that featured…
- Deadly Maps
- Deadly Maps collects every map from a book published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats (Amazon.com listing). From the site: “The first five maps reflect the worldwide proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and…
- Gavin Menzies in Australia
- Gavin Menzies, he of the hypothesis that the Chinese discovered America and the prime supporter of Liu Gang’s purported 1418/1763 map, will be in Australia this week to give a lecture at the University of Melbourne, according to tomorrow’s edition…
- California Map and Travel Center Closing
- Gadling reports that Santa Monica’s California Map and Travel Center, a travel bookstore that also stocks “a large selection of globes and a truly outstanding selection of maps,” is going out of business; the final closing date is May 31….
- Major Google Maps European Update
- First there was a massive update of Google Earth’s satellite and aerial photography, much of which affected (and improved) the imagery for Europe. Then that imagery was carried over to Google Maps, which again had an impact on European views….
- SF Bay Area Geology
- The USGS’s San Francisco Bay Region Geology and Geologic Hazards page has a lot going for it, mapwise. No surprise that much of it has to do with earthquake risks. There are three main sections: geologic maps compiled from several…
- 1421 Exposed: Scholars Respond to Liu and Menzies
- 1421 Exposed, which will be officially launched on May 1, is a web site put together by academics and researchers to combat Gavin Menzies’s theory that the Chinese discovered the world in the 15th century, and, in particular, to refute…
- Mapmaker Fined for Infringing Sherlock’s Copyright
- A Calgary mapmaker has been fined C$8,000 for making a cheap knock-off of a competitor’s city atlas. The judge ruled that Commodore Allen’s AMI Calgary Street Atlas infringed the copyright of Sherlock Publishing’s atlas of Calgary, saying that the differences…
- Because My Car Said So
- If you thought sending drivers along a 100-foot cliff was crazy enough, you won’t believe this entry from the annals of bad directions from wonky British in-car navigation systems. Except this time I’m not so sure if it’s the fault…
- Feed Problems
- As Hugo has noticed, there is a problem with The Map Room’s RSS feeds: yesterday they stopped updating properly, and starting yesterday and continuing today you may receive an error when trying to retrieve the feed. The problem is at…
- Green Maps Founder Interviewed
- Grist interviews Wendy Brawer, who heads, and was in 1995 one of the founders of, the Green Map system. One of the most recent green maps, highlighted by this interview, is the Powerful Green Map of New York City, which…
- Internet Country Code Map
- Here’s a map of the world that labels each country with its two-letter Internet country code; you can buy a paper version or download a big digital image from the site. Via MetaFilter….
- It’s Google Maps Again
- Google has changed its collective mind, and changed Google Local back to Google Maps. Now it’s up to Microsoft to do the right thing, too — and fix that abominably named Windows Live Local. See previous entry: Google Maps: No…
- Online Mapping Sites Compared Again
- Another mapping site comparison, this one from PCWorld.ca (via Cartography). I think we’re at the point where we’re going to see a lot of these: enough time has passed since last year’s betas were announced that (1) they’re mature enough…
- Gas Price Temperature Map
- GasBuddy.com lists gasoline prices across the U.S. and Canada; an apparently new feature, though, is this national gas temperature map that shows relative gas prices by colour value. Right-click each county for local gas prices. Via MetaFilter….
- MLA Language Map Updated
- The MLA Language Map (last mentioned here in June 2004), which displays the number of speakers of a given language in the U.S. by county, has now been upgraded: for example, the system now displays language speakers as a percentage…
- Online Maps for the Visually Impaired
- A List Apart, the web site about web design, tackles the question of making online maps accessible for visually impaired users. Even though maps are essentially a visual medium, it’s not as strange as it may seem: for author Seth…
- CNet: Monetizing Map Mashups
- A story on CNet about companies building their businesses around map mashups by Elinor Mills: “The main reason for caution is the very thing that makes mashups so popular — they’re fairly easy to create, and it’s not that difficult…
- GIS Internet Resources
- Via Ogle Earth, a collection of online GIS resources on the web site of the U.S. Army’s Topographic Engineering Center….
- Google Maps Mania Turns One
- Congratulations to Google Maps Mania on its first anniversary. I’ve given up trying to keep track of all the hacks and mashups — my present policy is to blog about them generally, and include any mashups when talking about a…
- Mapping Future Population Growth
- Population Action International, a group concerned about global overpopulation, is releasing a poster-sized world map that projects changes in world population density through 2025. Though the official release date is this Saturday, the map is available for download as…
- TechCrunch Compares Mapping Services
- On TechCrunch, Frank Gruber compares the features of five online mapping services — Ask, Google, MapQuest, Windows Live Local and Yahoo! — and draws the following conclusion: “Overall, Yahoo Maps was by far the best application tested. Its fast Flash…
- Theatri Orbis Terrarum Enchiridion
- Peacay’s got a nice post up on BibliOdyssey about the 1585 Theatri Orbis Terrarum Enchiridion by Favolius and Galle — not to be confused with the atlas with a similar name by Ortelius, a contemporary of theirs. “This atlas was…
- More on the Four-Colour Theorem
- Another page about the four-colour theorem, this one focusing on a new geometrical proof of the theorem (well, relatively new — the page is dated 1995). Lots of math, no maps. If you recall, the four-colour theorem says that you…
- Peter Dykhuis, Visual Artist
- Maps, flags and state symbols abound in Peter Dykhuis’s art: “You Are Here” superimposes a map of Halifax on envelopes; “Radar Paintings” uses airport radar images; “World View: The G7 Suite” encloses maps from each country within their respective flags….
- The New Yorker on Road Maps and Directions
- This week’s New Yorker has a long article by Nick Paumgarten on mapping, the principal focus of which is driving directions, but which has lots of little digressions into cognate areas like road maps (and their history) and digital mapping…
- Forbes on Online Mapping Sites’ Traffic and Income
- Forbes.com has an article on the online mapping business that focuses, naturally, on the business side of things, namely, traffic and income. Some interesting tidbits: Traffic to online mapping sites is up 20 per cent over last year. Yahoo! Maps…
- Gmaps 101
- GISuser.com has posted the first part of a three-part series on the Google Maps API, specifically on version 2. The first part is an introduction which thankfully doesn’t appear to assume too much prior knowledge; parts two and three will…
- More About MapQuest’s Future
- Over at Directions Magazine, Adena interviews a MapQuest manager, Christian Dwyer, about the company’s future directions. Included in her article is the following nugget: “MapQuest won’t be left behind: aerials are coming back in a future offering, as are ‘live…
- The Cartography of Brazil
- The Cartography of Brazil in the Collections of the National Library is an online collection of more than 300 maps of Brazil and South America from the National Library of Portugal. The main goal of this project was to make…
- Walter W. Ristow
- Earlier this month, MapHist subscribers learned of the passing of Walter W. Ristow, the former Chief of the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. Ristow died aged 97 on April 3. Today’s Washington Post takes a look…
- Intact Atlas, Asking 165 Large
- For the opening of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, today’s New York Times has a story about a collector and a very rare atlas: [William] Reese plans to show “The American Atlas: A Geographical Description of the Whole Continent…
- Paper Maps: Doomed in Canada, But Not Elsewhere?
- Capital News, the student newspaper of Carleton University’s journalism school, has a story about the imminent demise of paper topographic maps in Canada. (I suspect that link might not be permanent.) There’s nothing really new in this story: the Centre…
- The Paleogeography of North America
- Via Cartography, a stunning collection of maps depicting the paleogeography of North America. The images presented here show the paleogeography of North America over the last 550 million years of geologic history. The 40 images shown here are selected from…
- Yahoo! Maps Satellite Imagery
- Satellite imagery was added to the Yahoo! Maps beta last night; high-resolution (1-metre) imagery is now available for the continental U.S.; the rest of the world must make do with medium-resolution (15-metre) imagery. Yahoo! says that they’ve also taken the…
- Map Quotations
- Our friend Tony Campbell has added a page about map quotations to his Map History/History of Cartography site; the page doesn’t list individual quotations about maps, but points to sources where they may be found online. (He should probably add…
- Question: Online Maps on Morning News?
- Tim Tierney writes, “I heard that there was a feature about online mapping services that aired on 4-7-06 [i.e., Friday] on one of the morning TV news shows (possibly ‘Good Morning America’ or the ‘Today Show’) but I can’t find…
- Crackpot Directions Send Drivers Along a Cliff
- BBC News: “Drivers following satellite navigation systems through a village called Crackpot have been directed along a track at the edge of a 100-ft cliff.” Another entry in the annals of errors made by in-car navigation systems. Via Slashgeo. See…
- Cabspotting
- Cabspotting, which went live on Thursday, generates a real-time map of taxi movements by displaying the last four hours of trips by GPS-equipped taxicabs in San Francisco. (For some reason this reminds me of the cell phone map of Graz…
- GPS Tracking with a Treo 650
- A tutorial on setting up GPS tracking on a Treo 650 using a Bluetooth receiver, the Internet via the cellular network, and some software. Via Slashgeo….
- Schuyler Looks at the APIs
- On the Mapping Hacks blog, Schuyler Erle takes a look at the “big three” online mapping APIs: “The big three — Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Virtual Earth — have basically converged, and their map display APIs look more or less…
- MapQuest’s Mobile Strategy
- You’ll recall that it was previously reported that MapQuest was responding to the challenge posed by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! by moving in an altogether different direction: instead of a hackable API, satellite imagery and web interface innovations (although an…
- There’s Always Room for San Francisco
- Not exactly a map, but it’s close enough — it’s a city model, right? — and it’s cool: San Francisco in Jell-O (see also)….
- Guerrilla Wayfinding
- Bleeker compass by blueneurosis John Emerson notes that you can get disoriented when you come out of a subway (I’ve noticed this too, especially in places like Paris that aren’t built on a grid) and proposes a guerrilla wayfinding campaign…
- Again: Navteq in San Diego
- Still another profile of a digital mapping data provider’s employees as they survey the streets of (insert your town name here): this time it’s Navteq in San Diego. Via Cartography, with whom I’m in agreement: where are all these stories…
- Euratlas’s Antique Maps of Europe
- Euratlas, a map store, has a collection of 18th- and 19th-century maps of Europe at two zoom levels; the detail is just transfixing. At right, detail from an 1852 map of post roads and railways in and around Germany. Other…
- The Geographic Revolution in Early America
- Martin Brückner’s book, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity, looks at the rise in geographic literacy in the colonial and post-independence periods and the the cultural impact of that literacy. It’s now out in paperback….
- Anniversary
- Last Friday, The Map Room turned three years old. I’m not making much of a fuss this year (compared to last year, when I simultaneously launched a reader survey and a webhosting-bill fundraising drive, and posted an essay in honour…
- Camera with GPS, GPS with Camera
- More geotagging coverage. Tim’s page covers the steps involved in taking photos from a GPS-compatible digital camera (in this case, the droolworthy Nikon D200) and placing them on a Google Map; with source code (via Google Maps Mania). On the…
- David Rumsey Site Updates
- I’ve previously mentioned David Rumsey and his eponymous web site, an online repository of thousands of digitized maps from his even larger private collection. But yesterday Paul (aka peacay) wrote to say that the site had added more than a…
- Google Maps: API Update, Advertising Appears
- It’s been in development for a while, but version 2 of the Google Maps API was officially released today. Besides technical improvements such as a smaller JavaScript codebase, Google has lifted the page view limits and has promised 90 days’…
- A Geotagging/Geocoding Roundup
- I haven’t covered geotagging — adding location data to digital photos (and then doing neat things with that data) — as much as I’d like to, and I’ve got a lot of links on the subject gathering dust in my…
- Mapping Blog Address Changes
- A couple of address changes to tell you about. Glen reports that his new Anything Geospatial blog (previous entry) can be reached from the easier-to-remember URL of anygeo.com. On a similar note, James has moved Planet Geospatial, his geospatial blog…
