The Map Room

The CommonCensus Map Project uses people’s votes to determine U.S. cities’ spheres of influence. A neat concept. More than 13,000 votes have been received so far; they’ve plotted a map based on the first 8,000. They’re also working on sports maps that chart team affiliations. See Wired’s coverage. Via Ceejbot.

Radical Cartography is a marvellous collection of a variety of different maps from several different people. Lots of different subjects, too many to list. Go see. Via Cartography, whose description is better.

With online map services invariably using some variant of the Mercator projection, Antarctica inevitably receives short shrift. (Stefan notes that the same is true with Google Earth.) The remedy for this is the USGS’s Atlas of Antarctic Research, the interface for which allows you to apply all sorts of interesting data and image layers (it’s buggy in Safari). Via Ogle Earth and Térképes egoblog.

Currency exchange site Oanda.com uses a map-based Java application to show fluctuations in world currency exchange rates: the countries are coloured based on whether their currencies are up or down, and by how much, compared to the selected country. Clever. Via Cartography.

It’s a 2.2-MB PDF, but have a look at this nicely done map from the UN World Food Program, which plots the avian influenza outbreak against poultry and pig densities in southeast Asia, presumably to examine the potential impact of the disease’s spread. Thanks, peacay.

Ron sends along a link to these maps of unprovoked shark attacks worldwide, broken down by region, from the International Shark Attack File….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Each year, entertainment-industry insurance broker Aon publishes a map that shows the risks faced by filmmakers in various countries around the world — useful if you’re scouting locations and need to get a sense of what trouble may await you…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Shipwreck Central, the home page of the documentary series The Sea Hunters, has a really neat interactive shipwreck map that’s both zoomable and searchable. (Thanks to Gooberoo for the link.)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

EOGEO’s world map showing media coverage of various countries reminds me a lot of Global Attention Profiles (see previous entry), except that they’re measuring standard deviations rather than percentages. This is a bit more difficult to grasp intuitively, because a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A few airports use a Java-based web application to show (delayed) real-time air traffic patterns. The effect is extremely neat. Via Boing Boing….  •  Continue reading this entry.

MultiMap uses JavaScript to toggle between maps and satellite images of a given locale. One of a part of London has been making the rounds of the blogosphere this week (see Boing Boing and MetaFilter)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The BBC’s Civilisations is a Flash-based interactive map that shows the rise and fall of empires and civilizations: select the cultures and the speed, press play, and watch the map change as the years go by. (I’m reminded of the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A neat map of media offices’ New York locations — they do seem to be cheek by jowl, but that just might be Manhattan. Via Things Magazine….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a profile of David Rumsey, whose eponymous web site hosts a massive digital archive of his even more massive private collection of old maps: 10,000 maps — out of a total collection of 150,000! It’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The BBC has a story about an online mapping system that tracks the migration and nesting habits of sea turtles and, more significantly, that makes that information available to the public through an interactive viewer. Not that I could make…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This site about North American telephone area codes has a number of maps showing the current and historical area code assignments. With new area codes being added or overlaid all the time, it’s hard to keep up. But here’s a…  •  Continue reading this entry.