December 2008
- The Boston Globe’s Year in Maps
- The Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett takes a look back at the year in maps; I spoke to Drake a while back about potential items for this article, some of which made it into the final product. Highlights include local stories,…
- Redrawn Middle East Map Generates Controversy in Pakistan
- Apparently, Ralph Peters’s proposed redrawn map of the Middle East has generated a lot of controversy in Pakistan; Fasi Zaka tries to calm things down by pointing out that the map is only an intellectual exercise — some people…
- ‘All Over the Map’ in Sheboygan, Wisconsin
- At the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, from February 15 to May 10, 2009, All Over the Map is one of four exhibitions that are part of the Center’s “Journeys” series. This exhibition “focuses on rare historical…
- Using Stereophotoclinometry to Map the Solar System
- The New York Times profiles Dr. Robert W. Gaskell, who is working on producing topographic maps of various planets and moons of the solar system. Just now Dr. Gaskell is mapping all of Mercury and eight moons of Saturn. He…
- Google vs. MapQuest: Search Results Boosting Map Traffic?
- Google Maps’s traffic is rapidly closing in on MapQuest, and a MapQuest executive is alleging that it’s because Google Maps gets favourable placements from Google search results, Investor’s Business Daily reports. Search engines send their users to their own mapping…
- The Natures of Maps
- John Krygier has nice things to say about The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World, by his colleague, Denis Wood (Krygier and Wood co-authored Making Maps) and John Fels, and reprints the blurb he wrote for…
- Visualizing U.S. Immigration
- A visualization of immigration to the U.S. from 1820 to 2007 by Ian Stevenson. Via Andrew Sullivan….
- Mapping Rats in New York
- The City of New York’s health department has, since last November, been mapping the city’s rat population in an effort to get a better handle on its rodent control efforts. Time has an article: Today, rodent complaints by residents from…
- Making Maps with Unfit Data
- Charlie Frye has an interesting post up on the ESRI Mapping Center blog about the challenge of having to make a map with “unfit” data. “Unfit data will never work to make a good map. It’s a fact,” he writes….
- The Death Map
- Researchers from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, have mapped mortality from natural hazards in the United States; using data from 1970 to 2004, their research showed that “chronic” natural hazards like severe seasonal weather and heat waves were…
- MARTIAN: Mapping the Martian Crust
- MARTIAN — “MARs Tools for Interactive ANalysis” — depicts a number of layers relating to Martian geology — or rather, areology — via the Google Maps — or rather, Google Mars — API. Via Google Maps Mania. Previously: Topo…
- Online Map Updates: Google Earth Imagery, Yahoo International Coverage
- Another Google Earth imagery update; details at Google Earth Blog and/or Google LatLong. Yahoo’s expanded its international map coverage. “We’ve added detailed coverage to 45 new countries, with new data in a further 30 countries,” says the Yahoo Geo…
- A Google Street View Roundup
- It’s been a busy month for Google’s Street View, what with new imagery coming to New Zealand, expanded imagery in Australia, a doubling of U.S. coverage, and its availability on Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile (iPhone was last month). Meanwhile,…
- India’s Mapping Panic Continues
- Last month’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai have apparently triggered India’s long-simmering moral panic about maps, satellite imagery and security in general, and Google Earth in particular. A petition has been filed before the Bombay High Court demanding a ban on…
- Four ‘Offbeat’ Atlases
- The Christian Science Monitor looks at four “offbeat” atlases, all published in 2008: two rather pricey atlases of architecture; The Art Atlas, which “explores how inspiring new art forms have traveled, from the cave drawings of ancient Europe and…
- Nokia Maps 3.0 Beta
- I’m late in reporting this, so you probably already know that early this month Nokia announced a beta of version 3.0 of its Nokia Maps software. New features include pedestrian directions and terrain relief maps. Nokia’s maps are also…
- Making Heat Maps with Virtual Earth
- On the Virtual Earth evangelist blog, Chris Pendleton has a post pointing to several articles on creating thematic and heat maps with Virtual Earth….
- The Year in Google Maps
- On Google Maps Mania, Keir Clarke summarizes the year in Google Maps. (Oddly enough, more things have already occcurred since then.)…
- Magellan Sells Consumer Products Division to MiTAC
- GPS Tracklog and GPS Review are reporting that Magellan has sold its consumer products division — think the Maestro, RoadMate and Triton — to MiTAC, whose Mio subsidiary also makes consumer GPS products. Curiouser and curiouser. (Apparently Magellan has been…
- GPS: Features You Don’t Need, Features You Want
- Car navigation system buyers take note: Rich Owings explains the five GPS features you don’t need and the six features worth paying extra for, in his opinion. Interesting that, on balance, he considers lane assist and speed limit display more…
- CNN’s Auto Industry Map
- Via Chad, CNN’s interactive map showing the number of auto industry jobs in each state….
- Real Estate Site Finds Google Maps 385% Faster
- At the end of its two-year contract with Microsoft, real estate brokerage site Redfin went from a mix of Virtual Earth and Google Maps to Google Maps only. The reason? Google Maps renders pushpins a lot faster than VE, and…
- Geotagging Comes to Blogger
- Photos aren’t the only things that can be geotagged; blog entries can, too. (So can just about any discrete piece of information, for that matter; don’t be so un-2.0.) Anyway, Blogger has added geotagging to its “Blogger in Draft” interface…
- MAPublisher 8.0
- Version 8.0 of MAPublisher, the suite of cartographic plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator, was released Monday. Costs US$1,249; upgrades as low as US$549. Via MacNN. Previously: MAPublisher 7.0; MAPublisher 6.0….
- Tiny Geo-coder
- Tiny Geo-coder is a basic online app for determining the latitude and longitude of a location, with a simple API and practical uses for web development. Via Free Geography Tools….
- Mapping Rural China
- Never mind Navteq or Tele Atlas agents scouring the suburbs for new streets — how about Xinjiang’s army mapping service trying to keep up with rapid rural development in China? Via All Points Blog….
- Cartographica: GIS for the Mac
- Ogle Earth points to the preview release of Cartographica, a GIS application for the Mac. You’ll have to make do with Stefan’s first impressions; I’m even less of a GIS pro than he says he is, and have no…
- The Case of Farhad Hakimzadeh
- Last month, an Iranian-born businessman pleaded guilty to 14 counts for the theft of maps, illustrations and other pages from rare books in the British and Oxford University libraries. Farhad Hakimzadeh, 60, is believed to have taken pages from 150…
- Japan Map Exhibition in Munich
- At the Gemini Gallery in Munich until December 31, an exhibition called Maps of Japan — Japan on Maps: Benedetto Bordone published the earliest known printed map devoted to Japan worldwide 1528 in Venice based solely on the mention by…
- Global Groundwater Map
- In October, UNESCO released a global groundwater map highlighting underwater aquifers that straddle international boundaries, to coinicde with the submission to the UN General Assembly of a draft Convention on Transboundary Aquifers. The map is available for download as…
- Google Earth Browser Plug-in Now Mac Compatible
- What’s this? The Google Earth browser plug-in now works on Mac browsers (Safari 3.1, Firefox 3.0)? Now I’ll (finally) be able to view certain Web sites properly. Digital Earth Blog, Google Earth Blog. The combined Intel/PowerPC download is apparently 47…
- Mapping Phobos and Deimos
- From a cartographic perspective, the problem with Mars’s two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, is that they are not in the least bit spherical or even spheroidal — they are quite bumpy and irregular. If you thought map projections…
- Map Blog Update
- Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search is self-explanatory. Renalid is dead; Renaud Euvrard is now collaborating with Audrey Malherbe at their new blog, GeoInWeb (en français, bien sûr). GIS Pathway is a site — it has an RSS…
- The Atlas of True Names
- The Atlas of True Names “reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today’s maps of the World and Europe.” Place names are replaced with their literal meanings. It’s fascinating — and some of the…
- MapQuest: ‘Out of Hibernation’ or Muddling Through?
- I’ve been seeing more than a few stories lately about some incremental improvements MapQuest has announced to its service, which befuddles those who think that the venerable mapping service isn’t doing nearly enough in response to its upstart competition (i.e.,…
- ‘A Giant Animated Globe’
- Science on a Sphere is seriously cool: “a room-sized, global display system that uses computers and video projectors to display planetary data onto a six-foot-diameter sphere, analogous to a giant animated globe.” Developed by NOAA researchers, there are now…
- Even More Caricature Maps
- Also via MapHist, collections of caricature maps from a couple of libraries. The Library of Congress has scans of William Harvey’s Geographical Fun, circa 1868 (at right, from that book, Scotland). And a search of the University of Amsterdam…
- Online Maps Share Same Zoom Levels
- David Janes: “Did you know that Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and Virtual Earth all use the same map tile resolutions? That is, you can actually seamlessly switch between mapping systems and have everything line up exactly the same way.” Examples…
- Adidas’s Impossible Map
- Part of Adidas’s “impossible” ad campaign during the Euro 2008 competition, the Impossible Map is a contemporary take on “caricature maps” from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Links to previous examples of which below. Via MapHist. Previously:…
- The Growth of OpenStreetMap
- This post on the UK edition of TechCrunch about OpenStreetMap, written by Ed Freyfogle, provides a pretty good overview of what it’s been up to and where it stands vis-à-vis other mapping providers. Here’s an interesting excerpt: “As the biggest…
