"Most notably Kartograph allows to select and fine-tune the map projection, which is like the fundamental equipment for telling stories with maps" If that doesn't already make you excited, this introductory blog post should do the trick. Lovely.

NPR on Twitter networks and their basis in real life connections. "Inskeep: Suggesting what? That Twitter connections are following the connections that we already have in the real world? Vedantum: Exactly. So that the real world powerfully predicts what kind of connections we have in the virtual world. So if you are living in New York, you're much more likely to have followers in London than you are likely to have followers in a small town in the United States." The lede posits much more of a binary nature (as if you can't mainly follow friends with an additional layer of interest-based connections on top) which annoyed me, but there's still stuff of interest here.

"Based on a large sample of publicly available Twitter data, our study shows that a substantial share of ties lies within the same metropolitan region, and that between regional clusters, distance, national borders and language differences all predict Twitter ties. We find that the frequency of airline flights between the two parties is the best predictor of Twitter ties. This highlights the importance of looking at pre-existing ties between places and people."

"the impact of humans on the earth since the early 19th century has been so great, and so irreversible, that it has created a new era similar to the Pleistocene or Holocene. Nobel Prize winner Paul J. Crutzen even proposed the name Anthropocene, and it’s begun to catch on."

"It's a tool that has shaped modern civilisation, but is the map as we know it redundant? Samuel Muston wonders if it's now more valuedfor decoration than for navigation"

For some reason, I didn't have this bookmarked. Now I do. "We investigate how to organize a large collection of geotagged photos, working with a dataset of about 35 million images collected from Flickr." "We illustrate using these techniques to organize a large photo collection, while also revealing various interesting properties about popular cities and landmarks at a global scale."

Last October, artist Stephen Walter and I walked from Wedding, Berlin's north-western suburb, to the shores of the Tegeler See

"National Geographic Giant Traveling Maps are oversized vinyl floor maps. They are the largest maps ever produced by National Geographic and require a school gym or large room for use. Each map is accompanied by a set of activities and materials. The map is in one piece, and requires no assembly."

"This map, dated 1800, depicts the common at what may have been its high society high-water mark. These were the days of the Clapham Saints, a loose association of agenda-setting Anglicans."

San Francisco and the Bay Area don't have any major underwater tunnels (like the Mersey or Dartford tunnels in the UK), but there are plenty of others around. This seems to be a good overview.

Lately I’ve been working on a series of river maps, done in the style of Harry Beck‘s famous London Underground design.

"Published last night, more Future of Local stuff on FB Places, Foursquare & Grindr". Looks like it might be worth collecting all of these.

"Here is one of those books which defies the current bookworld gloom." This sort of sums up what I'd write about the book.

"The first library that we are launching is the geometry library. The geometry library provides a set of utility functions for performing distance, heading, and area calculations in a spherical geometry, such as on the surface of the Earth, and also provides functions for handling encoded polylines."

"Eric Fischer, an Oakland amateur digital cartographer, mines data found online to examine the information that people leave in their wake - anonymously, on sites like Flickr.com, Cabspotting.org and a NextBus.com - to reveal the patterns of a city."

"It turns out there are a lot of official and unofficial ways to define London’s extent." Oliver O'Brien writes a post I've been meaning to for ages (although he misses some definitions I'd use, or have seen people use: the combined Cities of London and Westminster, the inner London ring road, zone 1, and the old 0(1)71 dialing code area spring to mind). Maybe I still should...

"Websites like Flickr are not just collections of pictures. They are places where people forge links which are strong enough to change the places we care about."

"It may be therefore that modern visitors to the Lake District, at least as represented by people who upload geo-tagged photographs to Flickr, follow a tour that is more like the Picturesque tours of Gray than the Romantic experiences of Coleridge or Wordsworth." A non-paywalled summary of the research I posted a couple of days ago.

"'Mapping the Lakes' is a collaborative and explorative research project. Funded by the British Academy, the pilot project tests whether Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology can be used to further the understanding of the literature of place and space."

"Drawing on work carried out as part of an interdisciplinary project, ‘Mapping the Lakes’, the paper focuses on the ways in which GIS can be used to explore the spatial relationships between two textual accounts of tours of the English Lake District: the proto-Picturesque journey undertaken by the poet, Thomas Gray, in the autumn of 1769; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s self-consciously post-Picturesque ‘circumcursion’ of August 1802." Published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

"Building on our visualisation of 34 million geotagged Flickr images, we have decided to map the data normalised by population and area."

"Schalansky got interested in maps and atlases for the most personal of reasons. She was born in East Berlin; when she was 10, East and West Germany merged, “and the country I was born in disappeared from the map.” With that, she lost interest in political maps and became fascinated with the basic building blocks of Earth’s land masses: physical topography."

"I will confess to mild chagrin, because as well as having all these wonderful properties, MapIt does almost everything that Unlock Places does for Boundary-Line and Code-Point."

"I’m very pleased to announce that mySociety’s upgraded point and postcode lookup service, MaPit, is public and available to all. It can tell you about administrative areas, such as councils, Welsh Assembly constituencies, or civil parishes, by various different lookups including name, point, or postcode."

"Maps can be works of art, propaganda pieces, expressions of local pride, tools of indoctrination… Magnificent Maps brings together 80 of the largest, most impressive and beautiful maps ever made, from 200 AD to the present day." (Meta note: it's interesting how often this is tagged britishmuseum.)

Part of Julia Turner's series on signs and wayfinding, subtitled "Can better signs help people understand an extremely disorienting city?" The answer seems to be "yes".

"The Iranian transport minister has given foreign airlines 15 days to change the name to Persian Gulf on their in flight monitors. If they failed, they would be prevented from entering Iranian airspace, he warned." How are they going to know? Still, another interesting example of names being touchy. (I note the BBC's map says 'The Gulf'.)

"Like a child drawing, the old BART map could take you on a flight of fancy, but wouldn't get you to and from work." However: "If I consider the old BART map in the context of the visual culture of the San Francisco Bay Area, I am no longer certain of its inferiority." An interesting piece touching on the cultural links between subway maps and the cities (or areas) they depict. (I prefer the new map, but then, I'm a Londoner.)

A transcript of Stephen Fry's speech to the Royal Geographical Society in April. I haven't read it yet, but I'd like to remember to do so. (Maybe it's time to look into Instapaper.)

"With the given viewpoint (the point from which the picture was taken) and two known mountains on the picture, gipfel can compute all parameters needed to compute the positions of other mountains on the picture." "gipfel also has an image stitching mode, which allows to generate panorama images from multiple images that have been referenced with gipfel." Fancy.

How long have Hackney Council had this not-bad-actually mapping + local data app? It's the sort of thing I would have expected Up My Street to do, if the smart people who set it up had still been there when the Google Maps APIs matured. Ho hum.

"Bodle will be projecting onto the facades of buildings throughout Bristol estimated future high-tide marks should the entire Greenland ice cap melt. The idea is brilliant; I love the idea of mapping the future earth onto the earth of the present, of overlaying onto our present geography the virtual presence of a geography yet to come."

Tom Insam runs with my commentary (why don't the OS get their data onto the Google interface?) and highlights the Google response: the data's there, it's just not displayed. Unfortunately, as he also notes, there's not much of a good UI to display it in the end either.

The oft-quoted portion seems to be "Projects such as Open Street Map, through which thousands of Britons have contributed their local knowledge to map pubs, landmarks and even post boxes online, are the first step in the fight back against "corporate blankwash". Yes, but...

An interesting piece by Ian Jack in the Guardian on London's lost, including Skylon, the Euston Arch, and (in the main) the Thames tributaries, and the temptations of recreating history.

Does the new mayor read Strange Maps? Everyone's been linking to their article about London's "lost" rivers, and now this proposal crops up. Still, some nice walking routes can't be bad.

This is doing the rounds, but I agree with the comments: a bit of attribution (for both the text and map) wouldn't have gone amiss. On the other hand, I'm one of the freaks who could name five London rivers anyway, so it's not really for me.

I wonder how they'll find the (Perl, I think) infrastructure there? Also, does this point to a consolidation in mapping, and what happens to Streetmap?

Slightly aimless piece from Simon Jenkins on cartography and grand plans in London, as a vague plug for a forty quid (!) book about maps. I'm far fonder of the Barbican than he is, too.

On the Australian drought, managing water in a large basin, and the implications for others. Wonder what the (millions of) users of the Colorado River make of it?