July 2007
- Google, Censorship and Washington, D.C.: An Update
- Nikolas Schiller writes: The other day you featured my analysis concerning Google’s censorship of downtown Washington, D.C. I am contacting you with two updates concerning this research. 1. I discovered that the area in question is the exact same area…
- British Columbia and Google
- The government of British Columbia is in talks with Google about supplying information about the province for Google Maps and Google Earth. The potential goes beyond providing transit information, the Vancouver Sun reports: “Government input could include information on highway…
- Color Your Map
- From what I read about it on Free Geography Tools and GPS Tracklog, Zonum Solutions’ online tool, Color Your Map, seems like a quick way of throwing together a basic choropleth map or even a range map, especially if, as…
- Nautical Map Symbols
- On the Making Maps: DIY Cartography blog, John Krygier has a post about nautical symbols, both past (circa 1957) and present….
- A Cryptic Imagery Update
- Google announces the latest Google Earth imagery update with a cryptic blog entry inviting us to guess from the clues; those with less patience can turn to Digital Earth Blog for the answers. (Update: Google’s official answers.) If the Ottawa-area…
- GeoRSS in World Wind, KML in Virtual Earth
- Work is under way to add GeoRSS support to World Wind (via Chad). Meanwhile, Peter reports that in a fall update, KML support will come to Microsoft Virtual Earth (or whatever they will be calling it by then)….
- The Amateur Mapping Revolution
- Map hacks have been around for a couple of years, but the real revolution in online mapping is much more recent — and involves the ability of amateurs, rather than programmers, to create maps using online tools. That’s the argument…
- New World Cartographies: Mapping America, 1500-1776
- “New World Cartographies: Mapping America, 1500-1776” is a symposium taking place on November 2-3 at the American Museum in Britain in Bath; co-sponsored by the museum and Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, it “will focus on cartographic representations (and misrepresentations) of…
- Mapping Missouri at Missouri State
- “Mapping Missouri: Maps from the Collection of the Missouri State Archives,” a touring exhibition of maps from the Missouri State Archives (see previous entry), is on display at Missouri State’s Meyer Library until August 22. Springfield News-Leader….
- Tom Conoscenti, Brooklyn Cartographer
- The Brooklyn Daily Eagle profiles local city planner Tom Conoscenti, who “could easily be considered the Brooklyn cartographer these days. As a city planner with the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, Conoscenti is responsible for producing telling and informative maps of all…
- GPS and Cars in Spain and Quebec
- Spain may make fiddling with a car’s satellite navigation system illegal (via All Points Blog). Meanwhile, Quebec — where I live — may make them legal. It seems risible that something so widespread is not allowed, however technically and unenforced,…
- TomTom MergerMerger
- Yesterday’s big news was TomTom’s offer of €1.8 billion for fellow Dutch company Tele Atlas. Not really a surprise, given the growth in business of online maps and navigation devices. If the merger goes through, Tele Atlas will continue to…
- Mars HiRISE Images
- If you also like satellite images of other planets, proceed immediately to the home page of the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: “During its mission, HiRISE will collect thousands of images of the Martian surface, covering only…
- Google, Censorship and Washington, D.C.
- Nikolas Schiller writes to point out an article in today’s Washington Post about Google’s updated imagery of Washington, D.C., and how Google massaged the fact that the most recent imagery available — 2005 imagery from the USGS — censored several…
- Toronto Harbour, 1818
- Last Wednesday’s Toronto Star had a brief item about an 1818 map of Toronto harbour, with lots of detail about the map itself and how it came into the current owner’s possession. Via Map the Universe….
- Vermont’s Ancient Roads
- Roger Hart did a better job of covering the issue of Vermont’s ancient and abandoned roads on GeoCarta — which is to say that he covered them and I didn’t: see here and here. In a nutshell, there are apparently…
- Society of Cartographers Summer School 2007
- Steve Chilton writes in again with details of this year’s summer school put on by the Society of Cartographers: I thought that readers of the blog would be interested in the Society of Cartographers annual conference, that is to take…
- The Cartographers’ Guild
- Another online forum about maps — The Cartographers’ Guild — with a decided focus on fictional maps. The Cartographers’ Guild is a forum created by and for map makers and aficionados, a place where every aspect of cartography can be…
- Audacia Ray on GPS Navigation Systems
- Author, blogger and adult filmmaker Audacia Ray, writing about her road trip to LA, has this to say about in-dash GPS systems: I like not having maps crumpled up on the floor of my car, or misfolded in my bag…
- Computer-Generated Electoral Districts Redux
- Another web page dedicated to generating electoral district boundaries through a computer algorithm as a way to prevent gerrymandering — in this case, the algorithm looks for the “shortest splitline,” which in itself does not take into account any…
- The Million Marker Map
- One of my favourite web writers ever, Maciej Ceglowski, announces “an experimental set of Flash and JavaScripts add-ons to the Google Maps API” that allows for the presentation of very large datasets — the Million Marker Map: One challenge we’ve…
- CartoBlog
- Krygier and Wood are also involved, as two of several authors, in another cartography blog, CartoBlog, which seems to flow from the CartoTalk forum. The most recent entry, Allelopathic Maps and Google’s “My Maps”, is a good one: it argues…
- Molly Holmberg’s Watercolour Maps
- Most trail maps are spare and functional: without context, you might not even know that trees and mountains are involved. But geography graduate student Molly Holmberg has produced a watercolour map of the trails and open spaces of Bangor, Maine…
- Slashgeo Pining for the Fjords
- The reports of Slashgeo’s death may have been greatly exaggerated….
- Two Map Videos
- Global Concepts in Maps is an abbreviated excerpt from a longer educational film about map projections; more information here. I want to see the whole thing, but my, that doesn’t mean it’s good. The risible style of 1950s educational films…
- The Hipster GPS
- Introducing the Hipster GPS: “Inspired by 43Folders’s Hipster PDA, the Hipster GPS takes a similarly low tech approach. Also, the price of entry is far below that of an electronic GPS system.” Photo by James Foreman. Via 43Folders….
- More About Mapplets
- Google’s Mapplets, announced at the end of May, is coming along nicely: it’s now fully integrated into the “My Maps” tab of Google Maps, and you can save Mapplet content to a personal map. Google LatLong, Google Maps API Blog;…
- On the iPhone and Its Lack of GPS
- To read some of the commentary about the iPhone’s implementation of Google Maps, you’d think that a mobile mapping application is worthless without GPS. But is it? All Points Blog’s Joe Francica doesn’t say so outright, but in this dismissive…
- Google Maps: UK Geocoder, Palm OS Application
- I’m working on a big post on Google Maps on the iPhone today — or, more precisely, on the reaction to Google Maps on the iPhone — and I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to finish…
- Fantasy Atlas
- The Fantasy Atlas is a German-language collection of maps from various fantasy (and some science fiction) novels. That there are so many entries speaks to the fact that it’s virtually impossible nowadays to write a fantasy novel without creating a…
- Global Cities: Tate Modern Exhibition
- Global Cities, an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London until August 27, “looks at the changing faces of ten dynamic international cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo.” Ogle Earth’s Stefan…
- A Map Blog Update: GeoWeb, Cartographismes and More
- The GeoWeb 2007 conference, which takes place later this month and deals with “the convergence of Web technologies, XML, Web services, and GIS,” has a conference blog. The blog associated with Krygier and Wood’s excellent book, Making Maps (reviewed here),…
- Google Maps Russia
- A Russian version of Google Maps was launched yesterday. Major cities — like Moscow, obviously — get building outlines and subway stations: the full, mature Google map treatment. Other cities — I tried Ufa, a city of one million…
- Cahill’s Butterfly Map
- Arno Peters was not the first person to come up with a map projection as an explicit critique of the Mercator projection (or at least its use as a general world map rather than as a navigation tool), nor…
- More About My Maps, KML and Mashups
- Darren McEntee writes, about my post about using Google My Maps KML in mashups, Can you please add a small piece of info in regards how to add a KML file to Google My Maps? I have tracked some past…
- Shaded Relief in Virtual Earth, Google Maps
- A nice touch. In its most recent update, Microsoft Virtual Earth added shaded relief to its road maps. This is something Google Maps lacks, but Google Karten notes that the map tiles from the Shaded Relief world map (see previous…
- Upcoming Books on Waldseemüller
- On MapHist, John Hessler writes: Two new books on Waldseemüller and the context of the creation of the 1507 and 1516 world maps are due to be released in the next few months. The first, by Seymour Schwartz (an…
- Hollar as a Mapmaker
- A new display beginning July 20 in the Maps Reading Room lobby at the British Library: Hollar as a Mapmaker. “The display celebrates the 400th anniversary of the birth of the Czech artist and etcher Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677). Best known…
- How Google Earth Really Works
- Don’t miss this article if you’re at all curious about how Google Earth works on a technical level — how data measured in terabytes and terapixels get sent over a relatively straitened Internet connection and processed by a relatively limited…
- KPIX-TV on Geotagging
- KPIX-TV, the San Francisco CBS station, has a report on geotagging that covers at least two of the three bases — viz., manually geotagging photos and syncing photos with a GPS data logger — and mentions a couple of geotagging…
- Slashgeo Closes Down
- Unfortunately, Slashgeo is closing down, for an all too common reason: too much work to do in Alex’s spare time. Too few people who shared his enthusiasm for the project. And, though he doesn’t say it explicitly, for too little…
- A Google Maps Roundup
- About a month’s worth of links related to Google Maps from my increasingly preposterous queue. Because the news wasn’t all about Street View. The imagery update announced in early June for Google Earth was applied to Google Maps only a…
- The Cantino Planisphere
- Timothy Thomas writes: There are no good, hi-res images of the 1502 Cantino Planisphere — one of the earliest maps from the age of discovery. This object is included in the current exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery in…
- A Map Exhibitions Roundup
- Zoom (June 30 to August 18, Santa Monica, California). A group exhibition of map art at Santa Monica Art Studios’ Arena 1. “Working in the USA, Britain and Australia, all 19 artists in the show employ maps as resource material,…
- PC World: 100 Blogs We Love
- Oh. I seem to have made PC World’s 100 Blogs We Love (relevant page here; the single-page printer friendly version is easier to peruse), among some much more impressive company….
- More on GPS Driving Mistakes
- Travel blog Gadling has a post warning against blind faith in the directions given by a GPS navigation system — a subject near and dear to my heart, as previous entries will attest. The latest example comes from Italy, where…
- More About Waldseemüller
- More on Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map, the 500th anniversary of which is being celebrated this year. The Library of Congress reports that construction of the hermetically sealed encasement for their copy of the map — the last surviving…
