October 2006
- Flickr’s Hidden(ish) Map Features
- Rev Dan Catt reveals three hidden(ish) Flickr map features, including GeoRSS, microformats (both automatically built into RSS feeds and photo pages, respectively) and URL shortcuts….
- Dvorak on GPS: ‘Buy a Friggin’ Map!’
- Dvorak, being Dvorak, disses GPS devices: “I’ve had the various DeLorme and Microsoft systems and a number of nifty handheld devices. My conclusion: Buy a friggin’ map! Much of the appeal of the GPS is that the general public today…
- Wikimedia London Underground Maps
- In response to Transport for London’s crackdown on London tube map remixes (previous entry), the Wikimedia Commons is putting together a series of freely available maps of the London Underground. The maps are generated using PHP to process GPS…
- London: A Life in Maps
- Coming up at the British Library and running from November 24 to March 4, an exhibition called “London: A Life in Maps”: “Maps, views, letters, and ephemera from the British Library collections, show the city’s transformation from a Roman…
- Libre Map Project
- You may recall Jared Benedict’s stunt last August to “free the maps” by raising $1,600 to pay for a complete set of USGS topographic map data. The fruits of that fundraiser — 1:24K DRGs, geonames and other geospatial data files…
- BBC’s Click on Aerial Imagery
- The BBC program Click featured aerial photography on last weekend’s episode; the online article discusses the imagery’s use and impact on life, business and so forth. Via Ed Parsons and Very Spatial….
- MapQuest 21st in Alexa Rankings
- Very Spatial notes that MapQuest is 21st in Alexa’s rankings of popular web sites, which sounds impressive for a standalone map site. But, a couple of caveats. One, Alexa’s methodology is kind of like the Nielsen ratings — it gathers…
- Press Freedom in Google Earth
- Declan Butler has made a Google Earth layer from Reporters Without Borders’s Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index. I’m surprised they don’t put out a cartogram themselves. Via La Cartoteca (which just celebrated its first anniversary)….
- Ogle Earth on Google Integration Opportunities
- Stefan speculates on some of the potential ways that Google’s mapping products could be integrated into its other services and products, as per a recent company directive to make their stuff work together better….
- Cartography’s Last Post
- A year ago, if you had asked me which mapping blogs were my favourites (and my greatest competition), I would have said, with little hesitation, Cartography, the Canadian Cartographic Association blog run by Paul Heersink, and GeoCarta, by surveyor Roger…
- Walking Directions
- GPS receivers with built-in street maps and driving directions are now so ubiquitous that it’s apparently hard to remember any other sort. This article reprinted from the Wall Street Journal discusses handheld GPS receivers with driving walking directions for pedestrians…
- Zoomatron
- Zoomatron uses MapCruncher to overlay nautical charts on top of the Virtual Earth interface. Massachusetts and Washington states. The method reminds me of what Skyvector.com did with aeronautical charts. Via Windows Live Local/Virtual Earth. See previous entries: MapCruncher Update; MapCruncher….
- Archiwum Map WIG
- This site is a digital archive of maps produced by the Wojskowy Instytut Geograficzny, the Polish Geographic-Military Institute, which existed between 1919 and 1939 and produced some very good topographic maps of the country. Lots of scans here, all very…
- New Map of Jasper National Park
- The Jasper Booster reports that two Jasper residents named Mike (Mike Mitchell and Mike Day) have spent the past few years designing a new map of Jasper National Park, the first map of the entire park since Parks Canada…
- New York Subway Maps and Colour
- Making subway maps is more than just choosing between Beck-style diagrams and geographically accurate maps, or something in between; as with any good map design, colour choice matters too. Yale Daily News tells the story of alumnus R. Raleigh D’Adamo,…
- Milestone
- This is, by my count, the 1,500th post to The Map Room, which I will now waste by emitting stunned noises at having reached the 1,500-post mark. Whoa….
- Shakespeare’s World in Maps
- At the University of Michigan’s Clements Library until December 22: Shakespeare’s World in Maps. From the Ann Arbor News article: “The maps, many of them produced during Shakespeare’s lifetime, were selected from the Clements collection and include several rarely seen…
- Kohr’s Principles of Federation
- Strange Maps has been having fun with the maps of philosopher Leopold Kohr, who argued for smaller states in his seminal 1957 work, The Breakdown of Nations. An appendix to that book contained maps hypothesizing successful and unsuccessful federations…
- Firefox 2.0 and Online Maps
- Now that Firefox 2.0 is out, we can look at how it handles the complex code behind online map services. Fantom Planet finds that it handles Google and Yahoo! Maps well, but runs into a few quirks with Live Local….
- U.S. Population Density Map
- NASA’s Earth Observatory marked the U.S. population reaching the 300-million mark with a population density map of the United States (and surrounding countries)….
- Moses Greenleaf Biography
- Retired University of Maine professor Walter Macdougall has written a biography of early Maine surveyor and mapmaker Moses Greenleaf, the Bangor Daily News reports. Macdougall’s book, Settling the Maine Wilderness: Moses Greenleaf, His Maps, and His Household of Faith, 1777-1834,…
- Discriminav
- “Discriminav” is a dark bit of humour from Talkshow with Spike Feresten: Via GPS Tracklog. This skit is teh funny, but what it describes is also totally possible: all you’d need to do is mash up census data with driving…
- New Popular Edition Maps Online
- The New Popular Mapping site is a rough and ready interface to out-of-copyright (i.e., more than 50 years old) Ordnance Survey maps of England, most of which are from the postwar New Popular Edition series. It’s basically an alpha…
- Tranquility Maps
- The Campaign to Protect Rural England has released tranquility maps of England that depict the loss of natural landscapes to urban sprawl. BBC News coverage. Of course, tranquility is a value judgment, not a synonym for rural life. Ed…
- More German Driving Misadventures
- As God as my witness, I thought Germans could drive. But we have two more stories of drivers following their GPS navigation systems to unusual ends: last Monday, a driver rammed a staircase in Rudolstadt, and on Thursday a…
- The Bowman Expeditions
- Kansas University geography professors Jerome Dobson and Peter Herlihy are trying to put geography back on the map (so to speak) after a long, post-WWII decline by proposing series of expeditions — the Bowman Expeditions — that would collect…
- Donations and Advertising
- A couple of announcements related to my sad attempt to earn a living from web projects like these. This site now accepts donations via PayPal via the button on top of the right-hand sidebar. (Donations may also be made against…
- Google Earth U.S. Election Layers
- Google has added election guide and congressional district layers for the 2006 mid-term elections to Google Earth, Google Earth Blog and the Washington Post’s tech blog report (the latter via Ogle Earth). I love electoral maps in general, so of…
- NPR: ‘It’s Like a Mountain Office Range’
- NPR science correspondent Robert Krulwich had a story over the weekend about the practice of naming places after living people: in the 19th century, towns had a distinct tendency to be named after their postmasters; nowadays, though U.S. places cannot…
- Kim Martineau to Speak on Forbes Smiley Case
- Kim Martineau, the Hartfort Courant reporter who filed many excellent stories about the Forbes Smiley map theft case, will be a guest speaker at the November 16th meeting of the Washington Map Society; she’ll also be speaking to the New…
- Credit-Card-Sized Stainless-Steel Subway Maps
- Sure, laminated paper versions are cheaper, but a credit-card-sized, stainless steel map of the New York subway or London Underground is, well … it’s something, isn’t it? It’s fifteen bucks, anyway. Via Gizmodo, where they seem to think it’s…
- Twisty Table
- Here’s something different. While at PopTech, Jason Kottke discovered the Twisty Table, which was developed as a way to navigate high-resolution satellite imagery. “When you spin the table, the map zooms in and out and tilting the table scrolls…
- Better Mapping 2006
- In addition to the Map Designers conference next month in Glasgow (see previous entry), the British Cartographic Society is running Better Mapping 2006, four day-long seminars on map design: London, Oct. 30; Cardiff, Nov. 7; Liverpool, Nov. 23 and Edinburgh,…
- Is the Marquette Map a Hoax?
- Carl J. Weber, a history professor at DeVry University, argues that a well-known map, purportedly made by Father Jacques Marquette during the 1673 Joliett-Marquette expedition to the Mississippi Valley, is, in fact, a 19th-century forgery meant to bolster Marquette’s…
- Mac Version of National Geographic Topo! Reviewed
- Grant reviews the Mac version of National Geographic’s Topo! software: “a pretty decent package, but not great.” Via GPS Tracklog. Because the Topo! series is U.S.-only, I haven’t had cause to try it out; I hope someday to find an…
- National Geographic on OpenStreetMap
- National Geographic News has a story about the OpenStreetMap project — useful for giving it some context. Part of a series on “digital places,” with more articles forthcoming. Via OpenGeoData. See previous entries: OpenStreetMap at Where 2.0; OpenStreetMap Animations; Ed…
- Strange Maps
- Strange Maps is a relatively new blog about maps with a taste for the hypothetical, the fictional and the unusual. Via Cartography….
- Zoom Into Maps
- The Library of Congress Geography and Map Division’s Zoom Into Maps site isn’t just an educational tool and teaching resource, it’s a portal into, guide to and sample of the division’s very large map collection. Via Very Spatial….
- Seattle 911 Mashup Falls to Security Concerns
- The API is only one half of a map mashup; the other half is the data being plotted on the map. In many cases, mashup makers do not own the data they’re mapping, but are using public (or at least…
- Google Blogs Google Earth
- Google itself is getting into the Google Earth blogging action, but Using Google Earth is a bit more basic, more introductory in its coverage than Stefan and Frank are. It’s written by Google Earth team member John Gardiner. Via Ogle…
- A to Z GIS Reviewed
- GIS Monitor reviews a new book from ESRI Press, A to Z GIS: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems. “With short, clear, and authoritative definitions of more than 1,800 terms written by more than 150 subject-matter experts, this…
- Atlas de Trudaine
- BibliOdyssey introduces us to an online collection by France’s national archives of the Atlas de Trudaine, a series of more than 3,000 maps made by Charles-Daniel Trudaine between 1745 and 1780. “The maps themselves are highly detailed and were…
- Two Books About Google Maps Mashups
- Two books about programming with the Google Maps API are coming early next year, Google Karten reports: Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax, in the same series as the previously mentioned book about PHP and Ajax, and…
- New URL for Gallery of Map Projections
- On MapHist, Paul Anderson reports that his Gallery of Map Projections site (previously mentioned last December) has been moved to galleryofmapprojections.com; the former URL now throws a 404….
- Broer Library Adds 1,300 USGS Topo Maps
- The Broer Map Library, which I mentioned last month, seems to be coming along nicely; Dave Broer announced on Maps-L that scans of 1,300 old USGS topo maps have been added to the collection. “This brings our online offering to…
- Rand McNally Turns 150
- The Associated Press’s Dave Carpenter takes a look at map publisher Rand McNally on the occasion of its 150th anniversary, looking back on its history and at its future challenges (especially in re digital mapping). “[F]ollowing two ownership changes…
- BBC News: The Map Gap
- BBC News’s magazine article, The Map Gap, is all over the map: a discussion of how hard it is to present a true representation of the planet ends up touching briefly upon such diverse elements as map projections, Google Earth,…
- Fall Foliage Map
- CNN’s Foliage Map shows, for the U.S., when the best time of year is for viewing fall colours. I can tell you it’s all but over where I am. Via Gadling….
- Smiley Sentenced to Five Years
- The Hartford Courant: “A state judge sentenced E. Forbes Smiley III, the Martha’s Vineyard map thief, to the maximum five years in prison Friday, a move that was largely symbolic and unlikely to add time to the 3½-year sentence Smiley…
- Imagery Comes to MapQuest
- What? MapQuest now has satellite/aerial imagery? When did that happen? See previous entries: More About MapQuest’s Future; MapQuest at 10; AP: MapQuest and the Competition….
- Belgian Municipal Elections
- As he has for previous elections in Europe, Edward Mac Gillavry critiques the media’s maps of the Belgian municipal election results, which fall into two categories: a Google Maps mashup and a Flash map by Zonky that has appeared on…
- Google Maps on a Palm TX
- Google’s announcement yesterday of a new Treo version of Google Maps for Mobile made me wonder whether it would also work on WiFi-equipped Palm handhelds, despite their absence from the list of compatible devices. Now, I don’t have a Palm…
- Nintendo DS Subway Maps
- Homebrewed subway maps for the Nintendo DS, including London, Lyon, Mexico, Paris and Vienna. Some hacking required. Via Matt….
- Canadian Weather Radar
- Environment Canada’s Weather Office says they’ve improved the radar section of their web site. “The improvements include: the provision of extra geographical references, easier navigation from one local radar site to another, and a ‘how to use’ section.” Overlays…
- Geowankers Meet
- Annalee Newitz reports on the inaugural San Francisco geowankers’ meeting for Alternet (reprinted at Metroactive). Via All Points Blog; see also Boing Boing. (Updated 5:27 PM.) See previous entry: Geowanking….
- Santa Clara Sued Over Digital Map Licence Fees
- In California, Santa Clara County’s digital mapping data is so expensive to licence that they prevent “all but real estate developers, utility companies and insurance companies and other deep-pocketed customers from accessing it. The fees can go into the hundreds…
- Breaking: Canadian Topo Map Decision Reversed!
- Slashgeo reports: “As a followup on previous announcement of the end of paper maps for Canadians, we learn today that ‘[…] the decision to close the Canada Map Office as of next year has been reversed by the NRCan Minister.’”…
- Google Earth in the Classroom
- Google for Educators, a web site about using Google’s stuff in the classroom, includes a section on using Google Earth in teaching, including some lesson plans. Via Ogle Earth. There’s also a page on using Google Maps in the classroom,…
- The Map of Early Modern London
- The Map of Early Modern London is an interactive annotated map of London based on the 16th-century “Agas” woodcut map, with clickable points (akin to Google Maps pushpins) that take you to more detailed information about a given location….
- Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007, GPS Included
- Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007 was announced today. The highlight is that it comes with an improved USB GPS “locator” that turns your computer into a GPS receiver. This isn’t new: the 2006 version also came with such a…
- Hang a Left at the Pile of Sand
- Aged German driver obeys navigation system, ignores construction barricades, crashes into pile of sand. Via Engadget. See previous entries: Getting Stuck in a Narrow Welsh Laneway; Because My Car Said So; Crackpot Directions Send Drivers Along a Cliff….
- Cosmographia Fetches More Than £2.1 Million
- Wow. The 1477 Cosmographia, which was expected to fetch £1-1½ million at auction yesterday, instead sold for £2.136 million to an unnamed collector (AP, Reuters). That’s more than any other antique map or atlas has ever gone for at…
- Map Rectifier
- Map Rectifier is an online georeferencing tool. Take a map image, identify the coordinates of a half-dozen or so points, and the program will “warp” the map image to fit the projection on the right-hand side of the page —…
- Storybook England
- Storybook England is an interactive map to the locations associated with children’s literature, whether as fictionalized setting or behind the scenes. Briefly mentioned in the New York Times, which article promises a downloadable map, link to which downloadable map generates…
- How Current Are Online Maps?
- David Naffziger wonders which online mapping service has the most current maps and finds that for Chandler, Arizona (where rapid growth allows the maps to be dated relatively precisely), Yahoo! seems to be a step or two ahead of the…
- U.S. Forest Service Geodata
- GPS Tracklog has discovered a clearing house for U.S. Forest Service geodata, and talks about how that geodata can be used (hint: raster images can be viewed in most image viewers)….
- Online Maps Help Aerial, Satellite Imaging Companies Thrive
- The popularity of online mapping sites is having an impact on aerial- and satellite-imagery companies, Newsweek reports. Long dependent on government contracts, these companies now find their new clients — Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! et al. — contributing increasing amounts to…
- Warping Waldseemüller
- John Hessler’s Warping Waldseemüller is a new blog about applying mathematical methods to old maps as a way of testing their accuracy. Sounds like it’s working the same vein as the new scholarly journal e_Perimetron (see previous entry). Via MapHist….
- Question: Editing Scanned Maps with Software?
- Recently I’ve received a couple of very similar questions: both are from people asking how to edit and manipulate scans of paper maps. Chris Ellison writes, I am a history teacher who regularly uses maps for teaching purposes. The thing…
- Kozloff’s Exterior and Interior Cartographies
- The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s art critic points to an exhibition at the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon: “Exterior and Interior Cartographies” by Joyce Kozloff, which, according to the museum, “features drawings, collages, prints, paintings and sculpture. For fifteen years,…
- Cosmographia Auctioned
- The selling off of the late Lord Wardington’s map collection (see previous entry) continues. Next week, one of only two privately owned copies of the Cosmographia, the world’s first printed atlas — it was published in 1477, and based…
- The Viking Deception
- Set your TiVos: The Viking Deception, a Nova program about the Vinland Map forgery that was first broadcast in February 2005, is being rebroadcast on Tuesday the 10th. If you miss the show, the web site has plenty of…
- A Letter to Gary Lunn
- In the spirit of Maps for Canadians’s letter-writing campaign to overturn the Canadian government’s decision to stop producing topo maps (see previous entry), I have written my own letter to Minister of Natural Resources Gary Lunn. (More effective to write…
- Geotagging Review
- Zack reviews three geotagging software options: TopoFusion, WWMX and GPS Visualizer, and RoboGeo. Via GPS Tracklog….
- Hartford Courant: String Him Up!
- A Hartford Courant editorial adds to the chorus fulminating against the sentence handed to Forbes Smiley last week: Should a judge forgive a car thief because he returned the vehicle? Should a mass murderer get a lighter sentence because he…
- That Thing About iPhoto
- This post about hidden GPS and mapping settings in iPhoto has been making the rounds of the Mac rumour mill and the mapping blogs (AppleInsider, Ed Parsons, GPS Review, MacRumors, Ogle Earth). My response is, cool your jets, everyone. If…
- Google Maps Netherlands
- Initially I didn’t get the significance of yesterday’s launch of Google Maps Netherlands (see Google Maps Mania, Google Karten and Ogle Earth), especially since parts of Europe got Google Maps coverage last April. But, as Webmapper points out, the Netherlands…
- Australia Under Water
- From the Sydney Morning Herald: as part of an exhibition called “Australia from Space,” geographer Stephen Young has created six images of Australia that show how the continent would look if the world’s sea levels were to rise anywhere…
- MapQuest Upgraded
- Cartography reports that MapQuest’s interface and graphics have been upgraded; you can now, for example, pan around the map by dragging, like you can with all the other major online map services….
- Antiques and the Arts Online on Smiley’s Sentencing
- Antiques and the Arts Online’s article on Forbes Smiley’s sentencing contains some information not seen in other coverage. It doesn’t hurt that it lacks the gosh-wow factor inherent in so much mainstream coverage, where reporters stand in awe of the…
- NYPL Issues Missing Maps List
- Following previous lists issued by Harvard and Yale libraries, the New York Public Library has issued a list of missing antiquarian maps and a list of rare books from which maps have been taken. Via Maps-L. I don’t have any…
- Another Google Imagery Update
- Another update to Google’s satellite imagery today, Maps and Earth at the same time. Here’s an announcement. Via Google Earth Blog; I expect Frank Taylor will be adding to the list as more updates are discovered. See previous entry: Google…
- Maps and Society Lectures
- The program for the 2006-2007 series of “Maps and Society” lectures at the Warburg Institute, University of London has been posted; they take place one or two Thursdays a month and are free to attend. Via MapHist. See previous entry:…
- Ptolemy’s Geographia
- A new, scholarly edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia was launched in Switzerland last week. It’s apparently the first complete Greek text since an edition dating from the 1840s. The project page (in German only) is here. Via MapHist….
- Billboard Map Shows CIA Rendition Flights
- A map showing selected CIA aircraft routes and rendition flights over the past five years is now on a billboard in Los Angeles. John Emerson, who designed it, sent along the link to his post explaining the project….
- Connecticut Public Radio on Forbes Smiley Sentence
- Connecticut Public Radio (WNPR)’s program, Where We Live, had a long segment dedicated to the Forbes Smiley sentence on last Thursday’s program. Featured, a long interview with map dealer William Reese (see previous entry), who shared his thoughts on the…
- A9 Removes Maps
- Amazon’s A9 search engine has discontinued its street-level imagery and maps. Via All Points Blog. See previous entry: A9 Adds Maps….
