The Web 2.0 Map

In the last couple of years I've seen many attempts to show the internet using a metaphoric map. Most of those attempts have not held my interest and left me confused. The Web 2.0 Map is also confusing (after all the web itself is a confusing place) but it captured my interest because it is attractive, well organized and interactive. You can pan and zoom and also click the icons for further information.

The map is like a Risk board with icons for the primary players in the industry. If you click on them you get a somewhat advertise-y description of each one. As you zoom in more companies appear on the map. It is built on Google's mapping API and is organized from north to south with the "Clouds of Infrastructure" then the "Oceans of OS and UI", the "Platform Plateau", a couple of continents to hold social networking, searching and payment and at the bottom a "Subcontinent of Advertising." There's also some good puns scattered about.

At the top of the map there are alternate views for "Movements" and "Data Layers." Movements is designed to show "how a handful of major actors in the Internet Economy are moving from their bases of power into other points of control across the map." At the moment this view doesn't appear to change anything. The "Data Layer" tab was built for the 2011 Web 2.0 Conference. This view represents eight major internet players as cities, with skyscrapers for different data categories such as social, location, search and and content.

  Each city has the same buildings at different heights so in the view above we see Twitter having interest data as its highest building, Facebook has tall buildings for social and wildcard (uncategorized) data, Google's tallest building represents search data and Yahoo's is content.

Confused yet? For a description of the main map see John Battelle's Web 2.0 Summit blog post. For a description of the Data Layer (or Data Frame) see his Searchblog post.

Melting Sea Ice in the Arctic Ocean

Ice in the Arctic Ocean is melting faster than climate models have predicted. A recent article from The Economist looks at the causes. Included is this map comparing average and recent sea ice extents.

The article also links to an animation that shows the opening up of potential new shipping routes - also shown on the map above. Here is a still frame.

Some interesting notes from the article:

Melting ice creates a "feedback loop" where there is more water and less ice. Water absorbs light and heat, while ice reflects it. More water and less ice means more heat is retained.

Melting ice will enable the extraction of more fossil fuel from the area, creating another feedback loop in which more greenhouse gas emissions will be created.

The melting of the ocean ice will do little to raise the sea level, however eventually more ice will melt off of Greenland and other land areas and that will cause a sea level rise.

Tunisian Election Irregularities

Tunisians voted this weekend for the first time since their revolution. I was hoping to find an election results map to see if there were any regional patterns to the vote but the results are not all in yet. What I was able to dig up was this interactive map of voting irregularities from ISIE, Tunisia's independent election commission.

 While it looks numerous, many of the irregularities are fairly benign acts like tearing down posters, not entering the voting booth in isolation, and using the flag-whatever that means. The violence and threat categories are either mostly empty or some data is missing. In fact, many of the categories are fairly empty. The above map shows all incidents. The map below shows "violation of silence" if my bad French comprehension is accurate. I chose this category because there are lots of incidents. The violence and corruption maps are pretty boring by contrast.

As you zoom in, the larger circles spread out to show more precise locations.

You can also change the basemap. I switched from the default aerial view because I find the street map easier to read. The only problem is the highway markers start to look like incidents.

If I find an interesting election results map I will put it in a future post.

Weekend Special-Intelliglobe Knows Too Much

Here is a cheesy video ad showing gangsters chasing Replogle's Intelliglobe through the streets of Chicago. The globe is not only interactive, but can outrun gangsters while telling passersby how long it will take to fly to Caracas and what animals are native to the southeastern USA.

Boylan Heights and the Poetics of Cartography

Denis Wood's recent book Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas is featured on Places, an online journal of design. In the 1970's and 80's he began working with his students on a "narrative atlas" of the Boylan Heights neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. These maps are unique in that they remove the usual street patterns to reveal the bare details. His map of jack-o'-lanterns from this series was featured here on a Halloween post a couple of years ago.  The Places feature has a slideshow of some of these maps. Here are a couple of examples:

Fences

Traffic Signs

Porch Ceiling Colors

The Places feature includes Wood's eloquent descriptions of the creative process. Here is a quote about making the "Pools of Light" map:

 The usual “efficient” map would have located everything on the street onto a single sheet — that is, different marks for lamp posts, fire hydrants, street signs, trees. Our inefficient map concentrated on a single subject, and, rather than lamp posts, it brought the pools of light into view. No legend, no north arrow, no neat line, none of the usual apparatus. At last, a modernist feel!

That’s when I knew we could write poems in maps, and I began thinking seriously about a poetics of cartography.

 A few more maps:

Intrusions Under the Hill - water, sewer and gas lines

Barking Dogs

Other maps include a map of power lines titled "Squirrel Highways", a mailman's delivery route, a diagram of the distance and direction that rent money travels to absentee landlords, wind chimes, viewsheds, and a bunch of others. The slideshow can be seen here.

Map of the Week-Shipwrecks of the Delmarva

National Geographic features Shipwrecks of the Delmarva on their maps page. I never would have guessed that the chicken farms on Route 13 were perched on such treacherous soil. Here is a detailed view from the Zoomify interface.

From the web page:

Developed by renowned marine archaeologist and accomplished author Don Shomette, and designed by award-winning cartographer Robert Pratt, Shipwrecks of Delmarva is a stunning cartographic piece based on years of research and expert visual design.

I can't resist a few more detailed views.

The burning ship in this last one represents the amazing 2011 Phillies playoff run. Or maybe the gently sinking Rose is the better metaphor - it's just downstream from the stadium.

Map of the Week - QSL Card Maps

QSL (Query Station Location) cards are postcards sent by amateur radio operators to verify station reception. The cards provide a visual identity for radio operators and are popular collectibles. Garth Hamilton, operator of station VE3HO in Fonthill, Ontario creates map based QSL cards for other operators. Here are some examples:

Here's his own card.