The Map Room

A new full-text RSS feed is now available. The original, excerpts-only feed is still available, and will remain as the default feed for autodiscovery. But those of you who’ve been asking for a full-text feed now have that option.

(In case you didn’t already know, there’s also a feed for the Map Questions section, as well as a feed for my task list. All feeds are now in RSS 2.0 format, by the way, and can be accessed from the new RSS page.)

In the future, I hope to be able to offer more feeds, including some multi-category feeds (imagine a feed for tech, another for old maps, art and history) that will have to wait until I reorganize all the categories. RSS-related features make sense because, according to the results of the readership survey (which, three months later, I’m embarrassed to admit I haven’t finished processing), RSS is awfully popular with my readers. Keep reading for the data.

Continue reading this entry.

Digital Fine Art, which does reproductions from the collections of the National Library of South Africa, has a couple of pages of scans of 17th- and 18th-century maps of Africa and, more specifically, the Cape. Thanks to PK for the link.

The O’Reilly Network has an article by Mikel Maron, the creator of Mapufacture and worldKit, that introduces us to what those two tools can do.

Mapufacture is a new service to browse, build, and share interactive web maps, on a global or local scale. It combines user-created geodata with freely available worldwide satellite and mapping imagery, and location databases. The visualization engine of mapufacture is worldKit, a Flash-based tool that builds maps from RSS feeds. In this article, I’ll introduce you to mapufacture, but first I’ll provide an overview of worldKit, whose visualization capabilities are on par with any GIS viewer.

It’s pretty technical, but it doesn’t appear to be any worse than the Google or Yahoo! APIs, at least to my untrained eyes, and it looks like you can do some neat things with them. Thanks to James Lin for the link.

Motor Boating’s Electronics department periodically reviews charting and navigation software (see previous entry); this review of three brands is from their June 2005 issue.

Wired’s article on Google Earth examines a heretofore overlooked feature: “Google Earth’s true special sauce is the way it allows users to create markers for just about any venue or location, write a note describing it and then share it with the application’s entire user base.”

The Boston Globe’s Peter Howe has a story on the Google Maps API release (see previous entry), with a quote from yours truly.

Google has halted downloads of Google Earth for now; it seems that their plan was to limit the number of users of the new, beta service. It’s something they’ve done before with betas — think Gmail — and is probably related to the capacity of their infrastructure. They say to keep checking back to see when downloads open again. In the meantime, if you haven’t downloaded a copy yet, you’ll have to look on with envy as others report how cool it is — just like us Mac users.

If you’re bemoaning the lack of open geographical data in your country, the following should give you pause. In Russia, public maps are limited to a scale of 1:100,000, with secret installations “cleansed”; higher-resolution maps are considered state secrets, their possession punishable by law. There is a move afoot to declassify maps down to a scale of 1:25,000, which some consider insufficient. A spooky look at the implications of secrecy.

Sprol is a relatively new blog that uses satellite imagery to draw attention to the effects of environmental predation. Via MetaFilter.

Yahoo! Maps, not wanting to be counted out, also has an API; on a more basic level, see their guide to how to link to maps on their service. Via O’Reilly Radar. (Corrected.)

Update: Jeffrey McManus: Why the Yahoo! Maps API Is Better than Brand X Maps API (via ProNet).

Google has released an API for embedding Google Maps in your own web pages via JavaScript. Hacking Google Maps has just gone legit — not that Google seems to have had much complaint with the majority of the hacks out there. The main stipulation seems to be that the web site must be freely available. Via Google Blog; see also O’Reilly Radar for a first approximation.

Presumably this supercedes the DIY hacking resources out there (see previous entry).

In other Google Maps and Google Earth news, here are a couple more links:

• A directory of Google Maps links to UNESCO World Heritage Sites (via O’Reilly Radar).
• A mash-up of salesforce and contact data with Google Maps, from a software vendor in that field.
• MAKE’s short video on using Google Earth with a GPS.
• A magnificent MetaFilter post summing up a lot of recent Google Maps and Google Earth stuff.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times (free registration required) about getting lost using the directions in online mapping services. Key graf: “Roughly 1 in 50 computer-generated directions is a dud, according to Doug Richardson, the executive director for the Association of American Geographers. He blames inaccurate road information for most of the failures.” Via All Points Blog.

See previous entries: Google Maps’s MapPoint Moment; Where Do You Want to Go Today?; Good Maps, Bad Maps.

Fed up with delays on the London Underground, Stef took Transport for London’s tube disruption maps and spliced them together into a three-minute time-lapse movie that shows delays over a 15-day period. The result? “London Underground is disruption free, a remarkable 22% of the time it is running. My advice is to go and buy a bike.” Via Boing Boing.

In other tube map news, see rodcorp’s tube traffic map based on guesswork.

The Where 2.0 Conference gets under way today.

Update: Here’s Nathan Torkington’s opening address.

Google Earth is out. Requires a fast Windows PC. Three subscription levels, the basic one free. More once I’ve had a chance to look through the site; post your take in the comments. Via Google Blog.

See previous entries: Google Earth Preview; Google Factory Tour: Google Earth, Map API?

Update: Looks awfully comprehensive, with support for GPS waypoints and user data on the middle-tier ($20/year) Google Earth Plus service. 3D buildings for 38 U.S. cities. Integrated with Google Local search. How soon for the Mac version, folks?

Another update: Directions has a first look.

Noah Vawter’s project for a class at MIT was to map the bumpiness of Cambridge streets. Via MAKE: Blog.

Pruned has discovered Harold Fisk’s 1944 Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, the text and plates of which are available for download from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers web site (though at hundreds of megabytes per zip file). Has this to say: “The maps, scanned at high resolution and full scale, are some of the most beautiful I’ve seen.” Thanks to Gerard for the link.

Through July 10 at the Old Stone Store in Sheffield, Mass., an exhibit from the Sheffield Historical Society called Mapping Our Way into the Future, featuring surveying equipment and regional maps from the 18th century to the present.

Writing in India’s Financial Express, Y. R. K. Reddy calls for India to discard the “racist” Mercator projection, which makes “our country look so small on the map,” and advocates a switch to the Peters projection (about which see previous entry). My take is that the Mercator is a lousy projection for a general-purpose world map, for the obvious reasons, but that the Peters is too distorted to be a good alternative. I much prefer the Robinson (see previous entry), but while it’s actually used more by publishers, it’s neither as politicized nor as proselytized. The Peters is first and foremost a political stance rather than a projection.

Mapping Hacks (see previous entry) is finally shipping after some delays; Directions has a review. The book went to press too soon to take account of all the Google Maps hacks that have sprung up in the meantime, so they’ve announced that they’re providing a bonus chapter as a downloadable PDF for purchasers of the book.

• Buy Mapping Hacks at Amazon.com

Pyramids, uploaded by Alison Biggs.

Scavengeroogle and WorldChanging are among those who’ve discovered that Google Maps’s satellite imagery for the rest of the world just got a lot more detailed, with high-resolution images available for a number of cities and other locations outside North America. Which means a lot more interesting stuff can be viewed in close-up, as Alison discovers in this view of the Pyramids.

Update: As might be expected, Google Globetrotting is all over this.

Over on environmental blog WorldChanging, Jeremy Faludi calls for open-source public transit mapping services, on the basis that online mapping services are focused on driving directions rather than transit, and that transit services aren’t as useful or user-friendly, and lack the budget to do the job properly.

What people need is to be able to type in their start address and end address and have the website show them a map with directions, just like driving directions except for transit, with the route on the map showing where to pick up, where to get off, and where to walk between stations or destinations.

He and some of the commenters give some almost-there examples.

The mother of all mash-ups, perhaps: gCensus combines Google Maps with data from the 2000 U.S. Census — down to the block level. Via Boing Boing.

The USGS uses satellite imagery to trace the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It’s good for showing the topography, but the subsequent development and cultivation, particularly east of the Rockies, shatters the illusion somewhat. Via Gadling.

If you’re running Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, here are a couple more map-related Dashboard widgets. Quick lookups are the epitome of Dashboard, so it makes sense that location- and mapping-based widgets will proliferate; it’s worthwhile to keep an eye on Apple’s widget downloads site.

• The WORLDview Widget is a quick reference to the world’s countries; it provides limited information (capital, flag, a basic map) and, when I tried it, I found the interface a bit wonky. Via Gadling.
• The Google Maps Widget is self-explanatory: it provides access to Google Maps from the Dashboard. Via TUAW.

See previous entry.

A GPS traceroute of a year’s worth of walking and biking in New York — mostly Manhattan and Brooklyn — by a single person. Beyond neat. Via Gadling.

Vector One is “a spatially related blog” by Jeff Thurston, focusing mostly on locative technologies and GIS; it’s been running for a year but I only found out about it late last week. Shame on me. In a recent post, Jeff made the following point about the sudden rise in interest in digital mapping: mapping, he says, “is also about freedom.” Google Maps’s hackability “has allowed anyone to construct their own map. The number of creators has increased and that in turn has caused more participation as more people communicate. [ … A] digital map is a statement of what I think and see and how I exist in the world and share it with you.”

While there’s been no formal announcement of it, it looks like Google Maps has had an upgrade; reports of various improvements are trickling in from around the web. Scavengeroogle notes a change in the magnification slider; Here Be Dragons and Slashdot note that other countries besides Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Ireland now appear — it used to be that the countries included were surrounded by vast empty blue spaces — but it’s only the countries and their names, no further detail. From my end, I note that the names of Quebec municipalities, initially absent, now appear. Detail is improved here and there as well, though I can’t yet quantify it. If you’ve noticed something yourself, feel free to share in the comments.

Now that the whole world appears on the map side of Google Maps, it’s interesting to note that while the maps use a full Mercator projection, the satellite images use a cylindrical equidistant projection. I wonder how that’s reconciled when toggling between the two.

Following up on this post, Alain Wrobel submits this page analysing the results of last month’s French EU referendum, on which he worked; it breaks down the results for several regions and shows some rather high (I think) absention and ballot spoilage rates.

Theodolites are surveying equipment used in triangulation. They’ve turned up on a couple of web pages recently: Ethel the Frog wants to know how to use one, and Languagehat looks at the origins of the word (see also).

World Processor showcases the globes of Ingo Günther, which depict social, environmental and political data: everything from life expectancy to pollution to wealth distribution. Via WorldChanging.

Alfred Wainwright’s seven-volume Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells (reissued box set), published between 1955 and 1966, were apparently marvels of art and detail (though I haven’t found any samples online), and have served as the definitive guides to hiking that region. Wainwright, who died in 1991, stipulated that the guides could not be changed during his lifetime; now Chris Jesty has taken up that very task, publishing the first revised volume, with 3,000 hand-drawn changes, this month. (For background, see this hiker’s photos from that region and the Wainwright Society.)

Some more hacks, news and commentary about Google Maps that I’ve been saving up for another one of these roundup posts:

• Google Maps hacking gets mentioned on CNN (via Google Maps Mania).
• Google has deployed a 3D mapping truck in San Francisco, with the goal of having a three-dimensional framework on which satellite/aerial photos can be superimposed (via Google Maps Mania; see also sinceretheory).
• Media site Poynter Online talks about the implications of Google Maps for journalism, namely, GPS-tagged stories that pop up over a map of a location (via All Points Blog).
• When Yahoo! removed lat/long data from its RSS traffic feeds, a hack combining Google Maps with its traffic data went dark; thanks to some intervention by Tim Appnel O’Reilly, it’s back.
• Photo-sharing site Zoto now supports geotagging: photos appear on a Google Maps-derived page; here’s their tutorial (via Scobelizer).

A Directions magazine editorial, An Open Letter to GIS/Geospatial Software Companies, argues that between data providers providing mapping data to companies like Google, who then build hackable web tools, that are then used by GPS users to build custom maps or by hackers who mash the mapping data with other publicly available data, traditional GIS companies, whose focus has largely been on providing complete, if complex, tools for the professional marketplace, are at risk of being left behind. Dave Bouwman adds his two cents, with some points about simplicity and accessibility: it’s one thing to use GIS to analyse data, quite another to make end users use GIS tools to access that data.

Marc de Kam writes to plug his map quiz site, called, oddly enough, The Mapquiz: “The mapquiz shows you a series of mapfragments, and each time the question is: where is this? Some fragments are placed in a different perspective, others ripped out of their context. Just for fun.” In English and Dutch; the site has some formatting problems in Safari and Firefox.

Another map exhibition in Taiwan: at the National Palace Museum in Taipei until August 31, The World and its Warp and Woof: A Special Exhibition of Antique Maps Donated by Prof. Johannes Hajime Iizuka, featuring 33 maps donated by Iizuka and dating from the 17th century.

Last year I covered the first volume in Richard Carpenter’s series of historical railroad atlases covering the United States in 1946. I actually got it for Christmas last year: because I’m not familiar with the mid-Atlantic states the first volume covers, I found it a bit overwhelming — the maps show just the rail lines and stations, along with county lines and rivers, on a white background, so they’re a little stark if you don’t know the area. (But they correspond to USGS grid maps, and it’s almost essential in some of the more track-crowded areas.)

Having said that, though, I reminded myself that if this had been done with, say, Canadian railroads, or another area with which I had more familiarity, I wouldn’t mind the lack of non-railroad features one bit. Case in point: my father, who’s entirely responsible for my interest in trains, and knows much more than I do, likes the book quite a bit — strangely enough, I gave it to him for Christmas at the same time as Jennifer gave it to me.

Anyway, this is all to say that volume two of the series, which covers New York and New England, is now available.

• Buy A Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946, Vol. 2: New York and New England at Amazon.com
• Buy A Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946, Vol. 1: The Mid-Atlantic States at Amazon.com

Cristina D’Alessandro-Scarpari reviews A History of Spaces (by John Pickles) for EspacesTemps.net. Not for the academically disinclined: “A History of Spaces is certainly about geography and maps, but it is mainly a questioning of the processes of map-making and of map-using issues, the dynamics of production being more important than the result itself.”

• Buy A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World at Amazon.com

The 1895 U.S. Atlas features reasonably high-resolution scans of maps of U.S. states, counties and territories from that year. Via Plep (our countdown to International Plep Day continues).

Because it’s all in Dutch, of course, I can’t say much about the Internet Atlas of the Netherlands, except that it looks comprehensive. Via Plep — don’t forget to get your shopping done for International Plep Day (the second Monday in June) this Monday!

Sooner or later it had to happen: a Google Maps hack crossing a previously unknown line and Google putting a stop to the fun. Google’s been pretty good about hacks in general (see previous entries: 1, 2), but they’ve informed the people behind Google Maps Wallpapers (see previous entry) that the site violated their terms of service, and asked — politely! — that it be shut down. From the ensuing Slashdot discussion (proceed at your own risk), it looks like it crossed the line between personal use and derivative work. It’s all about Google’s own licences with the providers of the satellite and aerial photography, apparently, which some hacks (but not others) may put at risk, if I understand all of this correctly. Via O’Reilly Radar.

An update. One of four surviving copies of Martin Waldseemuller’s 1507 map — the first to label the New World as “America” — went for £545,600 at auction at Christie’s today. See previous entry. It’s the most any map has fetched at an auction; the previous record was £125,000.

Update: See also CNN and the Daily Mirror.

A new atlas announced Saturday by the UN, titled One Planet, Many People, shows the impact of the last 30 years of human development in a dramatic way, by showing before and after satellite photography of various locations. Sample images can be found here. News coverage from the BBC and CNN. Via MetaFilter.

Maps can be normative as well as descriptive; the names contained thereon can reflect politics as much as common usage. Thanks to a new law, maps and road signs of western Ireland will be in Gaelic only, even if the English name of the town is more commonly used. (As if driving in Ireland wasn’t bad enough already.) Via All Points Blog.

Back in April, Randy Cohen solicited submissions from readers of the New York Times Book Review for a literary map of Manhattan (see previous entry). That map is now online as scheduled, and it’s well done: interactive, with lots of stuff to click, and with locations from more than 70 works of fiction. Via Jason.

Google Maps Wallpapers is another hack (see previous entry) allowing you to build wallpapers — think posters or desktop backgrounds — from Google Maps satellite images. Via MAKE: Blog.

The Oregon Department of Transportation’s TripCheck site provides traffic information for the Portland area, including a neat speed map, which is a great way of visualizing congestion. Via Matt.

A trio of tools for Google Maps hacking: the Unofficial Google Maps Embedding How-To seems to supercede the GMaps-Standalone hack I linked to earlier (via Google Maps Mania); Noah’s Google Maps Hack for Large Maps allows you to make poster-sized maps from Google Maps tiles (thanks Noah); and gMapTrack, which seems to be a site for creating your own custom maps without the DIY hackery (via Google Maps Mania).

Webmapper, whose author is kind of Dutch himself, critiques the maps made by Dutch newspapers to display the results of the Netherlands’ EU constitution referendum, which took place yesterday. (The best of which, incidentally, is probably this one, but see Edward’s post for the others, and for some analysis.)

MapQuest. Remember them?

You wouldn’t know it from all the buzz about Google over the last few months (er, guilty), but MapQuest still claims to have a 70 per cent share of the online mapping market. Now, whereas traditional businesses are supposed to have migrated to the web, MapQuest is moving into to print; its titles will include road atlases, travel guides, and tourist maps. Thanks to Max for the tip.

O’Reilly Radar has a post about some very neat British Google Maps mashups that use data from BBC Backstage, including one for travel advisories, Sport Map (for teams and news about them), and this one, which links to images from traffic cameras in central London.

Mark Eadie eviscerates Beijing Public Transport’s web maps:

Nowhere, on this sorry excuse for an information system, do you get the smallest piece of information about bus routes or times. This has to be the most useless example of GPS and mapping technology ever put on line anywhere in the world. I urge you to go and have a look at this most wonderful piece of nothing.

I tried to look (here), but it wouldn’t load in Safari or Firefox. In creaky old IE 5.2 for Mac it loaded but looked terrible and didn’t work. Figures.

Conversely, he’s awfully impressed with the maps of Seoul, South Korea (city map; transit map):

The text stops at the Seoul city limits, but you can keep scrolling the map ENE towards Dorasan and Panmunjom. This is probably the only online mapping of North Korea you will find on the internet.

Via All Points Blog.