Portent

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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Popularity: 4% [?]

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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Popularity: 16% [?]

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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Popularity: 13% [?]

This shows just how useful the web can be, showing as it does where the fires are raging in California, where evacuation centers are located, what has been evacuated, where volunteers are needed, red cross centers and what’s closed etc. It is periodically updated from Twitter.

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Popularity: 15% [?]

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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Popularity: 11% [?]

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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Popularity: 16% [?]

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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Popularity: 12% [?]

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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Popularity: 9% [?]

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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Popularity: 16% [?]

The link takes you to a page of maps, click the World Map link on that page to see the overall map. Each map also lets you see some statistics about the highlighted sites, including numbers of reactors and types.

I don’t think its going provide much extra information to terrorists though but interesting all the same! Just in case you do anything naughty at one of the listed sites, they do keep information about which pages you visited and your IP address so expect a visit by the Feds if you’re bad!

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Popularity: 8% [?]

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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Popularity: 9% [?]

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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Popularity: 11% [?]

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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Popularity: 9% [?]

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!

Popularity: 14% [?]

There are a lot of cyclists in the world and many use the same routes and paths. Bikely is free and lets you share bicycle routes. It uses google maps to show the route and you can see step by step each of the path changes. Routes can be short, a few km or long, over several hundred and the database contains over 21,000 routes from many countries in the world.

Some routes have pop up instructions at each point along the route- the detail is what you put in. If you’re a cyclist, this is one site that is highly recommended.

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Popularity: 8% [?]