Portent

I love this- not only can you get a route from a to b, but if you decide you want to visit places c or d along the route, you can drag the route line, and it recalculates the directions and distances.

I entered Watford and Watford Gap and then dragged the route out to a somewhat more meandering route as you can see.

The bug- well click find directions and enter Watford and Watford gap. It should say 60.6 miles. Now click the Get Reverse Directions link and it’s suddenly 67.6 miles! Seven extra miles, yet it looks the same on the map? That’s only a minor bug, this is still terrific technology.

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Craigslist.org is a very well known free listings website. The linked site took student rentals data from craigslist and has plotted a heat map using Google maps to show which areas are the busiest. You can also see average rent per room

The dataset is over 120,000 points and there are some charts showing off some of it’s characteristics. If you have Firefox you can also see the average number of listings on a block by block basis- that’s quite a nifty overlay. (Shown below)

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Well London Underground (who receive over £1,200 a year from me!) have only themselves to blame after the earlier fiasco when they got heavy with one of their supporters over his anagram map.

Ed Sanders, a Cambridge Uni Computer Science student (I guess) and Wikipedian sysop, together with JDFoster has put together individual maps of the various lines as well as Zone 1 and (shown) Zone 2 maps using public domain data and software he’s written to fit smooth bezier curves through the stations. They look very nice and are licensed under Creative Commons. There are also some derivative maps including the July 7th 2005 bombings and July 21st.

The maps are hosted on the Wikimedia site, part of Wikipedia.

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The best way to describe Flash Earth is to place it mid way between Google Maps and Google Earth. It can draw data from Google, Yahoo, Ask, Nasa, Open layers or Microsoft but the views are satelite view so you see an aerial view rather than a map. What you can do with it is smoothly zoom in and out and rotate.

It’s perhaps more of a toy than a serious mapping website but I’m not denigrating it. It’s fascinating to look at something and then compare it with the alternative from various providers. One of them (Microsoft) has street names, so you get a Google Maps type hybrid view. What you can’t do of course with Google Maps is smoothly rotate the view- Flash Earth is very good and very quick at doing that.

It also has a decent search, which works with UK postcodes as well. Take a look at the postcode SW6 1TR. It’s where I work; the Empress State building near Earls Court (in fact next door to the exhibition centre). The google photo is maybe 1-2 years old but the Microsoft one shows it being refurbished about 5 years ago (it cost £90 million!) so the view looks like a building site!

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This is interesting and a bit different. If you plot countries of the world according to how they rate on the two scales of Traditional/Secular-rational and Survival/Self-Expression then you get the chart shown.

What makes it particularly interesting is how the cultures spread between countries. If you are into this type of thing then you’ll find the surveys and past survey data of interest on the site, plus a bigger version of the chart. (All pictures etc on Portent.org are reduced to 320 pixels in width)

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A recent phenomena has been instant blogging with Twitter being the main name in this field. People post single messages which pop up on a google map. Personally I’m not too impressed by it- the signal to noise ratio is too low and it comes and goes in a very ephemeral way- there’s little content.

Slightly more interesting is this site Flickrvision which does the same but with photos posted from flickr.com. At the moment the main 2d Google maps view doesn’t seem to work too well but it has a 3D rotating Earth interface which is pretty neat. But ultimately it is something to look at and then move on. Still, as a show case of Web 2.0 with mashups of Flickr and Google Maps/3D world it’s interesting.

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This could be useful if you have clear skies and know that a satellite is approaching . The site updates slowly so you can see the satellites move but it’s about as interesting as clock watching, paint drying etc!

There is a lot of data on this site- big lists of satellites that you can track, up to 5 at a time. If you have an interest in satellite watching this is not a bad place to start.

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Since 9/11 the US police have increased their use of paramilitary raids. Instead of approaching a house and asking politely they assume that the inhabitants are armed and go in very heavily handed as this tale recounts.

The Cato Institute is a non-profit public policy research foundation headquartered in Washington, D.C. The Institute is named for Cato’s Letters, a series of libertarian pamphlets that helped lay the philosophical foundation for the American Revolution. They have catalogued and now used Google Maps to highlight the increased number of botched paramilitary raids.

Understandably against real armed baddies, of which there are no doubts many in the USA, the old approach would be ineffective. But the number of botched raids does suggest a degree of sloppiness. In the tale listed, they only realised their mistake when they cleared the second floor “But the target has only got one!”…

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A fascinating 5000 year overview of the Middle East and who has conquered who up to the 20th century. Very nice use of Flash. Also you can click the timeline to jump to any date. (I bet the developer got fed up of waiting for the animation to run that far and added that!). The site also has other maps eg Iraq and the political pressures on it.

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Maps, especially online have always been restrictive in what you can do with them due to copyright etc. But there has been an international movement dedicated to providing unrestricted alternatives and as you can see, this map of my part of London is pretty good. I’ve put a blue rectangle around the area in the top map which the bottom map shows.

Like Google Maps you can zoom in and out and drag the map. No satellite data of course!

Not all streets are currently labelled- mine isn’t, but I could sign up and add it in. As more and more people sign up this becomes more and more valuable. One danger is of course that people will be lazy and copy data from commercial or copyright maps and that could be a problem. It’s not unknown for cartographers to introduce fake streets etc to try and spot when people copy their work.

So if you have a spare moment or two, why not help this map by signing up (no costs) and adding your local information.
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This is another site a bit like Flickrvision but instead shows very recent Wikipedia edits using Google Maps.

It’s a bit of a toy but interesting nonetheless. It’s a clever application by László Kozma, a grad-student at the Helsinki University of Technology. I never knew about the recent changes page on Wikipedia which shows fairly frequent updates.

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The Metropolitan Police are now showing crime figures in London, down to the sub-ward Level- i.e. how many crimes in an area that is just under 700 households.

Maybe it’s me but I get the feeling that this is done begrudgingly because the Home secretary wanted it. It would not take an awful lot of information to make this

• Available for Time Periods- eg say last 10 years
• Categorised by Nature of Crime eg minor (muggings), serious etc.

It’s a start anyway. Easy to see which areas are most crime ridden. Avoid Southwark!
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If you travel a lot round the world then you are probably more than old enough to drink in countries where drink is permitted! But it’s still interesting to see. And 25 for a drink in India? Well I suppose that stops students having a drink!

I’ve always thought it odd, in fact stupid that in the USA you can get married young, fight in the armed forces (average age in Vietnam was 19) yet not have a drink legally until you’re 21. Where is the sense in that?

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This is pretty. It’s a selection of highlighted locations from Google Maps that can be set as your PC’s wallpaper. You can choose one of five sizes from 1023 x 768 to 1,920 x 1.200. If you see somewhere interesting looking then send it in as a suggestion.

There are currently 29 places- you can see the squares at the top of the screen, just click to select. The picture highlighted shows fields from Kazakhstan.

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I love looking at old maps, this is a particularly good one. It’s amazing how many of the major European countries existed then. Also interesting is Spain which is mostly part of the Califate. Islam was spectacularly successful at conquering North Africa, the middle East and most of Spain. It took a lot of fighting for the Spanish to recapture Spain from the ‘Moors’ in the Reconquista which took seven centuries from 722 to 1492.

Warning- you may experience pop-ups on this site.

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PS. I have updated the links page to point to a new address which is on a site full of maps going back to the year 100. Definitely worth a look!

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