March 2007
- Garmin POI Loader Mac Beta
- Oops — another Garmin app for the Mac in beta: POI Loader, which allows you to upload points of interest to Garmin GPS from a Mac. Also via GPS Review. Keep it up, folks — I’ll get a GPS sooner…
- Nautical Charts in Google Earth
- The data for NOAA’s nautical charts is free and available for download, but not necessarily usable in your software application. EarthNC has taken more than 600 NOAA charts and converted them into something Google Earth can use. They’re selling…
- Garmin WebUpdater Mac Beta
- WebUpdater is an application that updates the system software of Garmin GPS units. Previously Windows-only, a beta Mac version is now available for download. The usual caveats about using beta software probably apply. Via GPS Review….
- Geocache Causes Bomb Scare
- If this story is any indication, geocaching may be the next fun activity to face the hammer of Homeland Security: GPS Scavenger Hunt Triggers Scare. Via GeoCarta….
- Google Reverts to Pre-Katrina New Orleans Imagery
- Google has apparently replaced post-Katrina images of New Orleans with imagery from before the hurricane clobbered the city, and people are upset about that, the AP reports (choose your source for the same article: Boston Globe, Guardian, Houston Chronicle,…
- NEMO Annual Meeting 2007
- The North East Map Association’s annual meeting for 2007 will take place June 7-8 at SUNY’s Fashion Institute of Technology campus in New York City. Via Maps-L….
- Planet Geospatial, Planet OSGeo
- James reports that he’s pushed out an improved version of Planet Geospatial, the geospatial blog aggregator, that should be a bit less wonky in its operation. Meanwhile, Christopher Schmidt decided that Planet Geospatial wasn’t for him, not only because of…
- More Virtual Earth Imagery Updates
- Hot on Google’s heels, there’s a major imagery update for Virtual Earth, with dozens of cities in Europe and the U.S. getting bird’s-eye photography, as well as high-resolution orthoimagery coming to a number of U.S. and Canadian locales. Previously: Virtual…
- Trans-Atlantic Driving Directions
- For a giggle, have a look at Google Maps’s driving directions from New York to Dublin, Ireland. Take special note of step 23. Lord help us if this makes its way into dashboard navigation systems. Via Kottke. Update: The MetaFilter…
- Interest in Old Maps Surges in Japan
- Yahoo Japan’s “Tokyo Tours With Old Maps” feature, which launched in January, has apparently kindled an interest in antique maps in Japan, The Japan Times reports. Not only is Yahoo’s site — not that I can read Japanese, but does…
- Google Imagery Updates for March 29
- Yet another imagery update for Google Earth: updates to Spain, Connecticutt and Austin, Texas; high-resolution imagery for a number of English locations, a number of U.S. counties, the French cities of Poitiers and Rennes, and downtown Vancouver, B.C. Via Ogle…
- Google Earth Banned in 15 Countries?
- A post on Valleywag, which I will quote here because I’m guessing most of you missed it, about Google Earth: “We’re hearing a rumor that the service, which overlays satellite imagery over a map grid, is actually forbidden in no…
- UTM Flyer: UTM in Google Earth
- UTM Flyer is a small, free program that lets you zoom to a location in Google Earth by entering UTM coordinates; it also converts between UTM and lat/long. Windows-only, so I haven’t tested it. Via Free GeoTools. Previously: New Google…
- Three More Blogs; Directory Update
- First, three more map/geospatial blogs for you: Free GeoTools by Leszek Pawlowicz, which started in January; points to (mostly Windows) software tools and data sources; covers quite a bit of ground, actually. Hablandodesigs by Juan Manuel Uribe Medina, a Mexican…
- North by Northeast: Five Centuries of New England Maps
- North by Northeast: Five Centuries of New England Maps is an exhibition running from March 31 to August 12 at the Flynt Center of Early New England Life in Historic Deerfield. “In addition to approximately 50 printed and manuscript…
- Atlas of Mexico
- UNAM’s Instituto de Geografía has made the Atlas nacional de México — the national atlas of Mexico — available online. The atlas is comprised of literally hundreds of high-quality maps on every subject a national atlas ought to have,…
- OCLC WorldMap
- The OCLC WorldMap presents national data about libraries — size of collections, number of users, expenditures, staffing — in a very nice interactive map. (I’m surprised at Russia’s singularly high numbers, though probably shouldn’t be.) Thanks to Richard for…
- Plunging into a River — That Makes Sense
- Here we go again. Another story proving that an onboard GPS is a poor substitute for common sense, or at least some signs of neural activity. A woman drove her expensive Mercedes into a river in Leicestershire, and needed to…
- MapQuest’s Send-to-Cell Feature
- Gizmodo disses on MapQuest’s send-to-cell feature, now in beta, which sends directions via SMS to your mobile phone: “In this day and age of mobile Google Maps and Windows Live Maps already on smartphones and dumbphones, only a few people…
- Jigsaw Maps
- A cabinet of jigsaw maps used to teach geography to the children of George III is now on public display, the Daily Telegraph reports. The cabinet and its contents were bought in 2000 and would have been exported to the…
- A Tip of the Hat to Strange Maps
- Strange Maps launched last September and first came to my attention in October. Since then it’s generated all kinds of buzz in the blogging world, establishing itself as a map blog with serious crossover appeal. I’ve been delighted to see…
- Map Course at the London Rare Books School
- If you have four days in July and £500, there’s a course called A History of Maps and Map-making being offered by the University of London’s Institute of English Studies as part of the new London Rare Books School, which…
- The Boston Globe on the Leventhal Map Center
- A short article in today’s Boston Globe about the web site of Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, which launched last fall. The interesting thing, though, is this bit about how maps are scanned for the site: To…
- Cartographic Perspectives Blog
- Cartographic Perspectives, the peer-reviewed journal of the North American Cartographic Information Society, now (as of yesterday) has a blog. Writes John Krygier in the blog’s first (and so far only) entry: “I plan to post abstracts and summaries of…
- Satellite Misconceptions
- Chad tries to address the confusion about a series of high-resolution images appearing in Google Maps and Google Earth. It seems to me that there are two misconceptions: that they’re all satellite images, and that they are real-time (or…
- Redesign in Progress, Sort of
- I’ve been mucking around with the site design today. No real design goals in mind — that would presuppose that I know what I’m doing — just tinkering, seeing what works. Weird stuff may manifest itself from time to time…
- GeoRSS, KML Added to Google Maps API
- GeoRSS and KML support has been added to the Google Maps API, which should have a major impact on how map mashups acquire their data. Since GeoRSS appears to be trivial to add to RSS feeds (Flickr can outputs GeoRSS…
- Maps for the Visually Impaired
- Presenting spatial information to those who cannot see is not, as you might think at first glance, a lost cause: a section of Natural Resources Canada’s web site is dedicated to providing (and researching methods of providing) maps for…
- Cambridge Map Department Will Be Renovated
- Cambridge University Library’s Map Department is getting renovated, beginning in July 2007 and continuing for nine months thereafter. More here. The map room’s current digs, which have not been substantially altered since the 1930s, “will be redesigned to present…
- Wisconsin and Great Lakes Map Exhibition
- On display at the University of Wisconsin’s Memorial Library until June 29, Making Maps, Making History: 300 Years of Original Maps from Wisconsin and the Great Lakes Region: The exhibit features an illustrated, hand-colored map of North America made in…
- Mapping Violence in Baghdad
- The BBC’s interactive map of Baghdad’s violence shows key locations, ethnic areas (which change throughout the period) and bomb attacks and casualties by month. Via Boing Boing….
- Author Reinterprets Maps, Claims Portuguese Discovered Australia
- A new book claims that a Portuguese fleet discovered Australia in 1522, nearly 250 years before Captain Cook arrived at Botany Bay: Reuters, Daily Telegraph. The claim, by author Peter Trickett, is based on a reinterpretation of a 16th-century…
- Chicago Maps
- A collection of 18 maps of Chicago, dating from 1900 to 1914 and showing everything from railroads to school districts, from the University of Chicago Library, in Zoomify format. This is one of several such collections from the U…
- Rediscovered Maps at Brown University
- An exhibit at Brown University’s John Hay Library opens on Monday and runs until April 25: it features some of more than one thousand maps “rediscovered” in that library. The collection represents the world throughout the time these maps…
- Global Map Projector
- NASA’s Global Map Projector — G.Projector for short — is a lovely little program that transforms any equirectangular map image (one is included) into another projection. It’s a tremendous amount of fun, and a very useful way of visualizing…
- Audio: Kim Martineau on Forbes Smiley
- Kim Martineau is the Hartfort Courant reporter whose first-rate coverage of the Forbes Smiley map theft case was the subject of many of my posts; since Smiley’s sentencing last fall, she’s been speaking about her experiences covering the case…
- Mashups and Businesses
- An article about the proliferation of map mashups does not sound exactly groundbreaking in 2007, but this piece from Information Week looks at how businesses are integrating map APIs into their web offerings. Via Anything Geospatial….
- Chicago’s Festival of Maps
- I must find a way to get to Chicago this November; the Festival of Maps sounds huge: Opening November 2, 2007 and continuing into 2008, the Festival of Maps Chicago is a citywide celebration of humanity’s greatest discoveries and the…
- Map of Canada’s North Cannot Be Found
- A map of three Arctic islands in Canada’s north, drafted by Norwegian explorer Otto Sverdrup, who discovered them, was thought to be in Canada’s national archives, after the government paid $67,000 to Sverdrup in 1930 for his diaries and maps…
- U.S. Army’s Field Manual on Map Reading and Navigation
- This is a real find: the U.S. Army field manual for map reading and navigation, including those things related to maps that the Army felt a soldier should know. (Which, according to chapter one, seems to be quite a…
- Geocaching Profiled
- An article about geocaching appeared in yesterday’s Newtown Bee; it’s as good and as accessible a general introduction as any, with the inevitable local angle. Previously: Geocaching in Canada’s National Parks; Geocaching; The Degree Confluence Project….
- Saxton-Boazio Atlas Auctioned for £669,600
- The atlas up for auction I referred to earlier, combining Christopher Saxton’s surveys of England and Wales with Giovanni Battista Boazio’s maps of Drake’s voyages to the Americas, both from the late 16th century, fetched £669,600 at auction yesterday…
- The Evolution of Michigan Road Maps
- Footpaths to Freeways: The Evolution of Michigan Road Maps is an exhibition now on display (until June) on the fourth floor of the west wing of Michigan State University’s Main Library; if you can’t visit, there is this online…
- Nikolas Schiller
- Yesterday’s Washington Post had a major piece about Nikolas Schiller, who’s been doing artful things with aerial photography and doing his best to stay under the web’s collective radar. (Sorry.) Excerpts from the Post article: Schiller barely pauses on…
- Map Librarians on Ning
- If you follow such things, you’ll know that Ning, which allows people to build their own social-networking sites, released a new iteration recently; Linda Shippert writes to announce that she’s used it to build a site for map librarians….
- Two Geospatial Industry Blogs
- Two new blogs from the geospatial industry: ESRI Support Center News (via James, who notes that it “seems to be in a holding pattern”); and MapInfo’s Location Intelligence Blog (via All Points Blog)….
- Geophoto Reviewed
- Over on Ogle Earth, Stefan reviews Geophoto, the Mac-only geotagging photo application announced in January. “I’m conflicted about Geophoto,” he writes. “It is exceptionally simple, but it costs $50 for far less functionality than what you get in Google Earth…
- San Francisco Fire Insurance Maps
- Alberto has uploaded a collection of microfilm copies of San Francisco fire insurance maps dating from around 1905 — which wuld have been just before things got very interesting indeed from a fire perspective. The trouble with microform copies…
- Afriterra
- Afriterra is an online collection of digitized maps — 500 have been done so far out of a planned thousand in the current funding round, with a total of 5,000 maps in the collection, dating from the 15th century…
- The Earth Viewed from Books
- An interesting post on Google’s Inside Book Search blog, where Matthew Gray crunches the numbers in Google Book Search to create a really interesting map: “I wanted to show the Earth viewed from books, where individual mentions of locations…
- Matt Fox’s Topographic Map Archive as Google Earth Layer
- Matt Fox, who georectified the Great Salt Lake bathymetric maps for use as Google Earth overlays, has made available his entire collection of maps through a Google Earth network link. The collection includes topo maps of the western U.S.,…
- Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica
- The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica “combines nearly 1100 hand-selected Landsat satellite scenes that are being digitally woven together to create a single, seamless, cloud-free image of the Antarctic continent — the most detailed color representation of this vast…
- An Online Maps Roundup
- Minor news items from the major online mapping services. Photos come to Google Maps — or at least photographs of businesses can appear in info windows when searching for them using local search. The Live Maps/Virtual Earth blog has been…
- URLs Changed
- In preparation for a Movable Type upgrade, I have changed all the URLs for the individual entry and archive pages. Old links are being autoforwarded to the new URLs, so don’t worry about that. But this change will probably cause…
- The Future of GIS
- Catholicgauze stirs the pot with an essay on the future of GIS and its increasing separation from Geography. Key graf: With [Geographic Information Science] focusing only on GIS the whole reason GIS exists, to study spatial phenomenon, is kicked out…
- Google Earth Layer Updates
- Google Earth is updating its content faster than CN is derailing trains nowadays: yesterday’s updates include New Zealand roads and an Appalachian mountaintop removal layer, as well as many updates to many existing layers and folders. Google Earth Blog, Ogle…
- Comments Back On, TypeKey Required
- The short version: comments are back on, though I haven’t finished all the planned upgrades; and TypeKey registration is now required to comment on this blog. About TypeKey: it’s free and relatively painless, so hopefully it will not be too…
- Government of Canada Frees Topo Data
- Last June, Paul posted something about a rumour that Natural Resources Canada had been on the verge of making digital topographic data freely available, but that it had been put on hold while the new minister reviewed the decision. Today,…
- Accidental Map Librarian Workshops
- This sounds like something I would be very interested in, because of my work at the local archives: Accidental Map Librarian Workshops (see also). If only they were taking place somewhere closer than Colorado. Via Maps-L….
- International Cartographic Conference
- The International Cartographic Association’s next conference — to be precise, the 23rd International Cartographic Conference — takes place August 4-10 in Moscow. Via Very Spatial….
- Comments Temporarily Disabled
- I’ve disabled commenting until I figure out how to reduce the memory usage of the comments script and improve the performance of the site overall. (The script has been getting killed by DreamHost’s automated process watcher, a sign that it’s…
- Canadian Mining Sector Wants Mapping Plan
- Also via GeoCarta, this story about a proposed national mapping strategy — a “decade-long plan to map Canada’s resource-rich north” — is framed in the context of Canada’s mining industry, which is hungry for new reserves that good mapping, which…
- Housing Development Built in Wrong Place, Map Blamed
- What difference does three metres make? Plenty, according to a story from the Edinburgh Evening News: a mistake in the location of old flats on an Ordnance Survey map is being blamed for a new housing development being built in…
- 50 Antique Maps Stolen in Pennsylvania
- You didn’t think we were done with the map thievery just because Forbes Smiley is in the big house, did you? Antique Trade Mark reports that 50 antique maps went missing from a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania rare book store some time…
- GIS and Map Libraries
- Geography Matters, the ESRI blog, has a post up on GIS and map libraries: “While not all institutions manage holdings of this size [the Library of Congress’s map collection], libraries and museums are realizing that a GIS can not only…
- More Google Imagery Updates
- Recent updates to the satellite and aerial imagery in Google Maps and Earth include 50-cm resolution imagery for Switzerland and Denmark, high-resolution (10 m) terrain for Switzerland, several French cities, full coverage for Utah and Wyoming, and a number of…
