The Map Room

Let’s keep some perspective about Facebook’s influence on the democratic uprisings in the Middle East. An interactive map from CNN looks at the comparative penetration rates of Facebook, the Internet, and mobile phones in North Africa and the Middle East. Check out the mobile phone usage rates on the Arabian peninsula. Flash required. Via @geoplace.

The National Broadband Map, launched yesterday, “is a searchable and interactive website that allows users to view broadband availability across every neighborhood in the United States.” Not surprisingly, the $200-million project, with 25 million searchable records, shows a clear divide between urban and rural connectivity. More at Engadget, Flowing Data and the New York Times.

From Life’s brief history of computing, a map of the Internet in 1972. Via Gizmodo.

Researchers tested whether regional boundaries reflected natural human relationships by examining telephone call data in Great Britain. Based on the length and frequency of calls between locations, they were able to create regions based on those networks. From the abstract: “Our partitioning algorithm yields geographically cohesive regions that correspond remarkably well with administrative regions, while unveiling unexpected spatial structures that had previously only been hypothesized in the literature.” Read the full article here. Via io9.

Greg’s Cable Map, a Bing maps app showing all undersea cables, including their landing points, data rates, and lengths. Via Mark Graham.

Previously: Undersea Cable Maps.

Satbeams displays satellite coverage maps — i.e., where on the world signals can be received from a given satellite — in a Google Maps context. Neat, comprehensive, and fascinating to look at. Via Mapperz and Ogle Earth….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Modern Mechanix reproduces a 1914 AT&T advertisement showing a map of telephone exchanges in the United States. The accompanying text pumps AT&T’s agreement to connect all telephone subscribers “regardless of who owns the exchanges” and notes that the incipient…  •  Continue reading this entry.

From the April issue of Wired, a map showing U.S. state-level laws banning or restricting mobile phone use while behind the wheel….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ken Arroyo Ohori writes, “The Mexican Secretariat of Communications and Transport provides good maps on all forms of transportation in Mexico. Maps are divided by state and have just been updated.” The maps are good-quality PDFs, which means they’re big…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A collection of maps of undersea cables, beginning with Atlantic telegraph cable maps from 1858 and finishing with a world cable map from 1992. Most of the maps are older, though, and quite interesting. Via Things Magazine….  •  Continue reading this entry.