Some pictures, a map, and a list.
1. Where has collected the best urban photography among recent Ffffound! finds.
2. I love advocacy group Global Voices’ map of online censorship (and anti-censorship) efforts around the world. Be sure to check out their gallery of national blockpages.
3. Deputy Dog has given us his choices for top 5 ‘deserted city’ scenes in film. I’ve always been awed by that empty London scene from 28 Days Later.
If you're new to Tightgrid, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Some pictures, a map, and a list.
1. Some pictures: Brisbane’s brightly painted traffic signal boxes.
2. A map: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops hosts a well-done interactive map of poverty within the United States.
3. A list: the most expensive cities for expatriate employees. New York has fallen to 15th, London climbs to second, and Moscow holds fast atop the board.
Happy GIS Day!
In celebration of GIS Day, I have begun Geocoding all of my place-related posts using the Geopress Wordpress plugin. Once Outside.in gets things together on their mapping site, these Geocoded posts should be plotted here, on Tightgrid’s blogmap.
I’ll keep you updated.
How to find your way in Japan
Streets in Japan are notoriously difficult to navigate. Japanese Penguin offers some advice on finding your way when the streets have no names. The bottom line?
[I]f you plan to drive in Japan, get GPS. If you have to walk or bike somewhere, make sure you have solid directions and know exactly where you’re going and how to get there. Directions from an English-speaking person are ideal, though at the very least you should carry a map. Finally, recognize that navigation in Japan is based on landmarks rather than street names, so it’s important to always be mindful of your surroundings.
Paris is greener than you think.
What’s in the middle of those oddly-shaped Parisian blocks? Peter Levine uses Google Earth to find Paris is much greener than a stroll down its boulevards might reveal.
Where the streets have no name (online mapping services must rely on landmarks).
Indian business blog Trak.in reviews three mapping services’ coverage of the subcontinent. They look at Yahoo, RouteGuru and MapMyIndia. Creating roadmaps of India is challenging “given the unorganized and inconsistent naming standards of the Indian roads” or the lack of road names in the first place.
When asked to provide directions from point A to point B, Yahoo’s attention to detail in the face of nameless roads is, well, look at this direction cue: “Take 4th Left (past Hindustan Petroleum Petrol Pump on the right), go 0.2 km”.
Related: The Map Room yesterday mentioned the difficulty of mapping Visalia, California’s ever-changing street suffixes; as the city grows, maps have trouble keeping up with streets that go from rural “roads” to urban “boulevards” over time.
Cabspotting time-lapse visualizations
The Cabspotting project has some great time-lapse maps of routes taken by Bay Area cabs.
Cabspotting is designed as a living framework to use the activity of commercial cabs as a starting point to explore the economic, social, political and cultural issues that are revealed by the cab traces. Where do cabs go the most? Where do they never turn up?
Chinese company City8 enters online mapping fray
Using home-grown technology, a Chinese firm has upstaged the likes of Google and Microsoft with a mapping service featuring 360-degree street-level imaging of extraordinarily high resolution.
The Sydney Morning Herald covers City8’s entrance to the online mapping fray [web site and a sample street level view]. The catch? City8 has been around since 2005 and has done street level mapping since 2006, nearly a year before Google dropped Street View on an oversuspecting public.
Video: Urban Sensing, Social Networking, And The Third Thing
From YouTube’s Google Channel: Urban Sensing, Social Networking, And The Third Thing.
Los Angeles Times fire map
The Los Angeles Times has mapped the fires in Google Maps. I was having a difficult time imagining where they were based on scattered news and reports. Not anymore.
Mapping carbon footprints
The Carbon Trust has created a surface map of CO2 emissions across the United Kingdom. There’s more discussion here.
A map of Wal-Mart’s spread in the United States
A map of Wal-Mart’s spread in the United States, from 1962-2004.
Online maps suppressed
With Google Earth and GPS, people have grown accustomed to online maps of whatever they’re searching for. But the boom in digital mapping has run into an obstacle. Some government officials are refusing to release electronic maps of what they call “critical infrastructure,” such as water mains and fire hydrants.
The Manhatta Project
October’s New Yorker profiles landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson; he’s using computer-aided geographical analysis to determine what Manhattan looked like before Henry Hudson sailed past in 1609.
The Wildlife Conservation Society hosts Sanderson’s Manhatta Project.