"Designers get handed a tool kit that has as many tools as a good swiss army knife, and the maps reflect these tools. Millions of people use them to make appointments across town, find restaurants, and drive home for the holidays.

But what if, instead of a swiss army knife, we used a box of crayons? Or charcoal and newsprint? Or play-doh? What would those maps look like? What could they tell us about the world?"

"This is an atlas, then, made by that other nature, seen through other eyes. But those eyes have been following me, unseen and without permission, and thus I consider provoking breach a necessary act." This is good.

"Design, host and share your own custom maps." Interesting - tile hosting, tile creation.

Trap streets - yes, of course. But trap rooms; trap architectures? That's iiinteresting.

"MCMap Live is a wrapper for mcmap, Zahl's fantastic and fast isometric Minecraft map renderer. What makes MCMap Live special is that it renders maps in pieces and lets you view them right away in an intuitive, minimalist interface. You can scroll and zoom all around your world and as quick as mcmap can render the chunks, you will see them. Instant gratification!" Impressive!

"...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography." Finally, found the Borges quotation about a map the size of the world.

All I can do is quote Tom Carden: "So let me get this straight... Inside the beloved and venerable Java OpenStreetMap editor, JOSM, you install a plug-in which runs a (port? emulator?) version of Lotus Turbo Challenge II. And you drive around the game on a level composed of the aerial imagery you were tracing in JOSM. And it records GPX tracks. Which you can trace into maps and share on OpenStreetMap. Jesus."

Mapping where people are leaving and arriving based on nothing more than what they said on Twitter. Pretty, and perhaps the beginnings of something quite useful.

"82 x 82 cm burned square, the size of one pixel from an altitude of 1 km."

"See what's been discovered by the Wasteland inhabitants!" Collaborative slippymap of what people are finding in the DC Wasteland in Fallout 3.

"The point here, is that the flickr team did not wake up one morning and think: “You know, if we captured THIS kind of data, we could create this mashup; so let’s create an application.” Instead, they re-used data they were already capturing, and brought out something very interesting indeed. By creating tools which match their data (and could be used with other data of the same kinds), flickr is able to expose layers of value from the rich-pickings of their own data-cloud. The good stuff is where the data are." Yes, it is.

"I mapped the strength of the wi-fi signal across levels 1 and 2 of the Library, the primary areas that the Library’s wi-fi is used. By taking readings across the floor of both levels, using standard wi-fi-enabled consumer equipment in order to mimic the conditions for the average user [...], I was able to construct a snapshot of the wi-fi signal strength across the Library." Some lovely work by Dan Hill.

"Joyce Walks is a psychogeographical art project which generates walking maps for any city in the world based on remapping routes from Ulysses allowing users to create a mashup of their own walk to be shared with other users both on the Joyce Walks site and as embeddable maps on any site."

"I've just added a new feature to the site: maps showing many places at once. They allow you to, for example, see all the churches in London Pepys has mentioned in one glance. Or London streets, or places outside Britain, and more." Some fantastic maps-and-pins from Phil and Sam.

"Greebles are the parts that "look cool, but don't actually do anything". There's an entire discipline here composed of special effects artists and asset designers working to hide the plywood spaceships and simple game world polygons beneath an encrusted surface texture." And this is the trick to make the little bits look like part of a whole. Lovely talk from Mike at UXWeek.

"...the act of mapping is itself a process of analysis, discovery, and design. It is a process of finding and giving meaning to information, of contextualizing information, and of developing new understandings of the places represented."

"TrailRunner is a route planning software for all kinds of long distance sports like running, biking, hiking, inline-skating, skiing and more." Imports data from Nike+, apparently.

"Snapshot provides an alternative view of listings from Trulia and was developed in collaboration with Stamen Design." Beautiful - great connection between filmstrip and main panel, and the motion blur hits the delight sensor on the head.

"I set out to find the longest distance for which Google Maps would give Driving Directions. Now that they've shut down the fun "swim the Atlantic" feature, things have changed a bit."

"I’m a female and a feminist. I dislike the usage of the word ‘ho’. However, as a geography major, I find this song hilarious, and had to map it." A more accurate-than-normal piece of hip-hop infographics.

"...with all of its data, Flickr knows what, exactly, is -- quite literally -- the most photographed barn in America. Where everyone is taking pictures of taking pictures." Sippey, on how Flickr is (inevitably) building a map of the world the size of the

Technically hardcore, dense paper explaining how the Dungeon Siege environment was constructed without a loading screen. Word of the day: "frustrum". Interesting stuff in here. Now, how to apply it?

"this is probably a bit naughty" - maybe, but a nice hack nontheless.