december 2003 archives

Sunday, December 28, 2003

Misplaced commentary

Some months ago, I talked about the growing emphasis of location in the blogging community. The most prominent usage of location is of course the location of the bloggers, typically communicated by the GeoURL meta tags.

However, blogs can be found on the most unlikely locations according to Maciej Ceglowski. Some of these locations are the result of plain typos in the coordinates provided. After his second iteration of visualising his Friendster network using the blogosphere, Dav also observed that people obviously lie about their location too. I am sure this applies to the GeoURL meta tags as much as to information people provide about themselves on Friendster.

The other extreme is to be able to follow bloggers at any time, whether they are publishing at that moment, or not. Most of these tracking systems are run by companies. TRyPTiCHON open sourced their code so everyone can now create their personal tracking application!

Friday, December 12, 2003

Location's hot at ETCon

For a while, some geowankers have been lobbying with the organisers of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference to put “location” on the agenda. Well, they certainly have been successful: there's a Location Track with geowankers Joshua Schachter and Chris Heathcote.

There will be some interesting tutorials as well. First of all, there's the Open Source GIS tutorial, touching on a lot of topics that relate to collaborative mapping. The tutorial doesn't necessarily relate to mapping, but is about data visualisation, Flash, and PHP. Should I stay or should I go?

Tuesday, December 02, 2003

How to lie with maps

It's already been two years ago I visited the exhibition The Lie of the Land in the British Library. I really enjoyed seeing so many fine maps. A Russian map from the Cold War period depicting a familiar area (in this case it was South London) always takes my breath away! A similar exhibition Kaarten uitgelegd is showing in the Utrecht University Museum right now. The Cartography Section contributed to the exhibition. As professor Ormeling used to give an interesting lecture on maps depicting the Soesterberg airforce base since its early days, I am sure it's well worth visiting the exhibition.

That maps are a powerful means to transfer a specific message is shown on Mapping Votes by County. Taking data from the California Statewide Special Election various maps have been created, mostly cartograms. It's not very often you come this map type these days. The article genuinely achieves to make cartography more appealing...