A big change from a year ago is that there are an awful lot of blogs about cartography, mapping and the geospatial industry: I list a bunch of them in the directory (which needs another update, I think), and there are web sites that aggregate posts from across the mapping blogosphere as well, such as Planet Geospatial.

But there are other blogs the focus of which is not exclusively cartographic or geospatial that nonetheless are a source of great material about maps and mapping, and they sometimes find things that the mapping blogs might otherwise miss — especially when those things deal less with the professional side of mapping and more with the artistic, cultural and political aspects. Here’s a list I’ve put together off the top of my head:

• BibliOdyssey: peacay’s been great at sending me links; and his blog about illustrations in antique books is equally great.
• BLDGBLOG, a blog about architecture and landscapes, sometimes has map- or satellite-photography-related posts.
• Boing Boing, an insanely popular polyglot blog with a taste for the quirky and the geeky, often gets into the arty and hacky sides of mapping.
• Kathryn Cramer, a science fiction editor and writer, has a blog that delves deeply into a number of subjects, one of which, especially during last year’s hurricanes and the Pakistani earthquake, was the use of Google Earth in the context of disaster relief.
• Gadling, the Weblogs Inc. travel blog: when you talk about travel, mapping is an obvious adjunct.
• Google Blog: it’s not always the first place we hear of a new feature for Google Maps or Google Earth, but it’s never bad to get the news from the horse’s mouth.
• Kottke.org: I’ve frequently found some interesting stuff via Jason Kottke’s remaindered links.
• MAKE: Blog, the adjunct to Make: magazine, has featured some DIY hacks about geotagging, GPS and the like.
• MetaFilter: lots of this site’s members (like me) seem to have a serious mapping jones, based on the material that gets posted there from time to time.
• O’Reilly Radar is, among other things, a good place to go for “Where 2.0” and mapping hackery information.
• Plep: the granddaddy of linklogs, and one of only three I follow that does not have an RSS feed, Plep’s postings are invariably a treasure trove for those interested in history, literature, the social sciences and art.
• Scobelizer: as good a place as any for breaking news on Microsoft’s mapping products; I’ve found Robert to be both enthusiastic and quick to the draw.
• Things Magazine’s blog is another good read and a good source for map-related content.
• WorldChanging: environmental activism is, in my experience, heavily reliant on geospatial data and mapping — it’s essentially about the planet, and so’s geography — so it’s no surprise that mapping-related posts show up on this environmental blog.

Blog anniversaries are breaking out all over; I guess a lot of mapping blogs had their start in 2005, and those that have stuck it out for long enough are now able to mark their first-year milestones. Cartography turned one year old on Friday; congratulations to Paul and the Canadian Cartographic Association for putting out a very fine blog that is one of the few general interest mapping blogs (rather than focusing on, for example, specific mapping technologies or the geospatial biz) and does a dangerously good job of keeping me on my toes. (At times, actually, I’ve wondered whether he’s making me obsolete.) Don’t miss Paul’s analysis of the stats and the things he’s learned during a year’s blogging.

If you’re interested in antique celestial atlases, you’ll want to bookmark Historical Celestial Atlases on the Web, which provides links to a number of online reproductions of old star atlases. Via La Cartoteca.

See previous entries: The Face of the Moon; Star Atlases; Celestial Atlases, Antique and Modern.

Australia on the Map, 1606-2006 is a web site that commemorates the 400th anniversary of the first charting of Australia by European explorers. For our purposes, the neatest part of the site is five scans of early maps of Australia dated 1606 to 1814. Via MapHist.

S. P. Low from the University of Singapore, looking for software to make cartograms, writes:

We are working on a project that attempts to track the global construction market using cartograms, such as those rectangular cartograms used by the World Bank’s where size of a variable (say population) dictates the size of the rectangle for a country. We came across your fantastic website, searched the archive but couldn’t find an answer to our question. Would you be able to advise if there is such a software available which we can purchase for this purpose?

See previous entries: Cartograms from Worldmapper; Cartograms and Map Distortions; Electoral Maps Made Proportional; Even More U.S. Presidential Election Maps; U.S. Elections Results Cartogram.

I must confess that I haven’t yet taken a very close look at Platial.com, a web site built on the Google Maps API (see previous entry), so it was only via this National Geographic News article about mashups that featured the site that I first became aware of a neologism that one of the site’s founders, Di-Ann Eisnor, has apparently coined: “neogeography,” which describes, I think, the merging of user data and experiences with online mapping technologies. Mashups, in other words — but “neogeography” sounds more respectable.

A quick check — for example, the “neogeography” tag at Technorati — suggests that the use of the term is beginning to spread, but it’s largely limited to Platial.com users, who are musing about what it means. Cult of the Internet:

So, the first obvious question is what the hell is a neogeography. Mmmm, Well, beats me. But the site lets anyone, even a nut like me, create maps marking their favorite places and telling the world all about them. I like anything that lets people like me share our insanity.

PlaceKraft, which compares it to psychogeography:

The term is sufficiently abstract to serve as a broad category of un/non-professional geographic practices (walking mapping, tagging, etc.). It would often be appropriate to replace a number of activities/projects currently denoted as psychogeographic, with neogeographic. Psychogeography could then be a narrower term evoking the implicit political ambitions of the Situationists.

Deadly Maps collects every map from a book published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats (Amazon.com listing). From the site: “The first five maps reflect the worldwide proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and their missile delivery systems. The country maps show the major nuclear installations, both civilian and military, in each country.” Via MAPS-L.

Gavin Menzies, he of the hypothesis that the Chinese discovered America and the prime supporter of Liu Gang’s purported 1418/1763 map, will be in Australia this week to give a lecture at the University of Melbourne, according to tomorrow’s edition of The Australian’s Higher Education supplement. Geoff Wade, the most prominent English-language critic of the map, is none too happy about this: “It is precisely the wrong way to put Australian history on the map. And indeed, it is the historical mapping of Australia that is at stake.” Definitely read the whole thing. Via MapHist.

See previous entries: 1421 Exposed: Scholars Respond to Liu and Menzies; Experts Still Doubt Chinese Map’s Authenticity; Chinese Map Controversy: Liu Gang’s Press Conference; Chinese Map Media Briefing; A Look Back at the Chinese Map Controversy.

Gadling reports that Santa Monica’s California Map and Travel Center, a travel bookstore that also stocks “a large selection of globes and a truly outstanding selection of maps,” is going out of business; the final closing date is May 31.

First there was a massive update of Google Earth’s satellite and aerial photography, much of which affected (and improved) the imagery for Europe. Then that imagery was carried over to Google Maps, which again had an impact on European views. Then, yesterday, driving directions came to some European locations in Google Maps, which was kind of odd because the street data hadn’t shown up yet. Now, as of this morning, European streets have arrived in Google Maps — I tested a part of Paris I once stayed in, and everything’s there, but I can’t speak to every European country or city.

Update, April 27: More details from the Google Blog.

The USGS’s San Francisco Bay Region Geology and Geologic Hazards page has a lot going for it, mapwise. No surprise that much of it has to do with earthquake risks. There are three main sections: geologic maps compiled from several sources that show materials and structures; quaternary maps that show fault lines that have slipped during the Quaternary period (i.e., within the last 1.8 million years); and liquefaction maps that show where the ground is at risk of turning into quicksand during an earthquake. In each section, maps can be viewed through a Flash viewer or downloaded as either JPEGs, PDFs, or Google Earth files. Via MAPS-L.

1421 Exposed, which will be officially launched on May 1, is a web site put together by academics and researchers to combat Gavin Menzies’s theory that the Chinese discovered the world in the 15th century, and, in particular, to refute the authenticity of Liu Gang’s purported 1418 map of the world. Via MapHist.

When the Chinese map story first broke a few months back, I was worried that the academic skeptics weren’t getting their side of the story out as effectively as Liu and Menzies were, but they’ve been getting better at it. Fortunately, the media loves a controversy.

See previous entries: Experts Still Doubt Chinese Map’s Authenticity; Chinese Map Controversy: Liu Gang’s Press Conference; Chinese Map Media Briefing; A Look Back at the Chinese Map Controversy.

A Calgary mapmaker has been fined C$8,000 for making a cheap knock-off of a competitor’s city atlas. The judge ruled that Commodore Allen’s AMI Calgary Street Atlas infringed the copyright of Sherlock Publishing’s atlas of Calgary, saying that the differences between the two were “purely cosmetic.” Via Cartography.

I’ve been a fan of Sherlock’s maps for years. Their first product was a super-detailed coil-bound atlas of Winnipeg that came out when I was still living there. It knocked the city’s collective socks off. It had detail that no other map of the city had at the time: intersections with traffic lights were marked, as were street numbers at key intersections and virtually every public building. (The detail was analagous to, for example, that of Michelin’s Plan de Paris.) It very quickly became the standard map of the city; it’s now been through ten editions (my favourite in terms of map design was still the first), and they’ve also done a Calgary map — which is what the judge ruled was ripped off — now in its eighth edition.

If you thought sending drivers along a 100-foot cliff was crazy enough, you won’t believe this entry from the annals of bad directions from wonky British in-car navigation systems. Except this time I’m not so sure if it’s the fault of the system or the drivers who rely too much on it rather than their own common sense. The headlines say that satellite navigation systems are telling drivers in Luckington, England to drive straight into the river. It’s a bit less straightforward than that: there are “bridge out” signs there, and the drivers are ignoring them, relying instead on what their cars’ navigation systems are telling them. The river is normally about two feet deep but is higher after rainfall, and one or two cars have had to be pulled from the water each day since the main route’s closure. Via Engadget and Gizmodo.

See previous entry: Crackpot Directions Send Drivers Along a Cliff.

As Hugo has noticed, there is a problem with The Map Room’s RSS feeds: yesterday they stopped updating properly, and starting yesterday and continuing today you may receive an error when trying to retrieve the feed. The problem is at Feedburner’s end, and is detailed here. Hopefully they’ll be able to rectify the problem soon; you’ll know it’s fixed when this entry appears in the feed.

Meanwhile, the rest of the site is unaffected, and new entries will continue to appear in the meantime. Only problem is, you won’t know about that if you rely (as I do) on RSS feeds to learn about site updates.

Update, 5:20 PM: The problem could be my hosting provider blacklisting Feedburner; I’ve e-mailed to ask what’s up.

Update, 5:55 PM: We seem to be back, though I’m not yet sure why.

Grist interviews Wendy Brawer, who heads, and was in 1995 one of the founders of, the Green Map system. One of the most recent green maps, highlighted by this interview, is the Powerful Green Map of New York City, which highlights the city’s energy footprint. Via Cartography.

See previous entries: Green Maps; Sauchie’s Green Map.

Here’s a map of the world that labels each country with its two-letter Internet country code; you can buy a paper version or download a big digital image from the site. Via MetaFilter.

Google has changed its collective mind, and changed Google Local back to Google Maps.

Now it’s up to Microsoft to do the right thing, too — and fix that abominably named Windows Live Local.

See previous entry: Google Maps: No Longer Beta, No Longer Maps.

Another mapping site comparison, this one from PCWorld.ca (via Cartography). I think we’re at the point where we’re going to see a lot of these: enough time has passed since last year’s betas were announced that (1) they’re mature enough to review and (2) the tech press has now had enough lead time that the reviews are now starting to appear. Of course, these reviews will be obsolete as soon as the next data or feature upgrade is announced.

GasBuddy.com lists gasoline prices across the U.S. and Canada; an apparently new feature, though, is this national gas temperature map that shows relative gas prices by colour value. Right-click each county for local gas prices. Via MetaFilter.

The MLA Language Map (last mentioned here in June 2004), which displays the number of speakers of a given language in the U.S. by county, has now been upgraded: for example, the system now displays language speakers as a percentage of a county’s population. Via LanguageHat; see also Language Log.

See previous entry: MLA Language Map.

Update: More from Inside Higher Ed.

A List Apart, the web site about web design, tackles the question of making online maps accessible for visually impaired users. Even though maps are essentially a visual medium, it’s not as strange as it may seem: for author Seth Duffey, it’s a matter of providing data inside a web-based map that can then be parsed by non-visual browsers. In other words, making data embedded within the map accessible outside the context of the map. Duffey, a web developer, tackles the problem using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so I can grasp what he’s doing; GIS developers, on the other hand, may find what he’s doing as elusive as I find geodata most of the time. Via Very Spatial.

A story on CNet about companies building their businesses around map mashups by Elinor Mills: “The main reason for caution is the very thing that makes mashups so popular — they’re fairly easy to create, and it’s not that difficult for someone to duplicate the more successful ones. On top of that, it’s not clear yet how much money can be made with these sites. Are they the next big thing on the Web, or just a nifty niche for small companies and hobbyists?”

Via Ogle Earth, a collection of online GIS resources on the web site of the U.S. Army’s Topographic Engineering Center.

Congratulations to Google Maps Mania on its first anniversary. I’ve given up trying to keep track of all the hacks and mashups — my present policy is to blog about them generally, and include any mashups when talking about a general topic, but for the most part I won’t link to a site that merges this rather than that data source with an online mapping API — but it’s important, I think, that somebody keeps track of this phenomenon, so I’m glad to have Google Maps Mania with us. Thanks, Mike!

Population Action International, a group concerned about global overpopulation, is releasing a poster-sized world map that projects changes in world population density through 2025. Though the official release date is this Saturday, the map is available for download as a PDF file. The map is only a forecast, but it shows some interesting regional variations: very high population growth along the Ganges; depopulation in eastern Europe, Russia and Japan.

On TechCrunch, Frank Gruber compares the features of five online mapping services — Ask, Google, MapQuest, Windows Live Local and Yahoo! — and draws the following conclusion: “Overall, Yahoo Maps was by far the best application tested. Its fast Flash interface, multipoint directions, live traffic information, and easy send-to-mobile feature make it the hands down winner. It also features the most robust API options.” Via Spatially Adjusted.

I’m not sure I agree: if Yahoo! is ahead, it’s not necessarily by far; and for users outside the U.S. the Yahoo! feature set is considerably weaker: Canadians, for example, will get better data from Google and Microsoft.

Peacay’s got a nice post up on BibliOdyssey about the 1585 Theatri Orbis Terrarum Enchiridion by Favolius and Galle — not to be confused with the atlas with a similar name by Ortelius, a contemporary of theirs. “This atlas was produced during a highly active period in terms of cartographic printing, particularly in Antwerp,” peacay writes. “Mercator’s world map came out in 1569. The first atlas from Ortelius came out in 1570. Braun’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum […] was published in 1572. They were all influential, very popular and had many editions.” A digital edition of the complete atlas is available online (viewer plugin required).

Another page about the four-colour theorem, this one focusing on a new geometrical proof of the theorem (well, relatively new — the page is dated 1995). Lots of math, no maps. If you recall, the four-colour theorem says that you only need four colours to have a map in which no two adjacent countries have the same colour. See previous entry. Via Plep.

• Buy Four Colors Suffice: How the Map Problem Was Solved at Amazon.com

Maps, flags and state symbols abound in Peter Dykhuis’s art: “You Are Here” superimposes a map of Halifax on envelopes; “Radar Paintings” uses airport radar images; “World View: The G7 Suite” encloses maps from each country within their respective flags. Dykhuis wrote to say this about his site: “This site is an overview of artwork that explores the graphic, social and political contexts of maps and map-making in contemporary culture. Of major interest is the overlap between fixed, analog, paper-based maps and the fluid domain of digital mapping courtesy of satellite systems and 24/7 computer-based viewing.”

This week’s New Yorker has a long article by Nick Paumgarten on mapping, the principal focus of which is driving directions, but which has lots of little digressions into cognate areas like road maps (and their history) and digital mapping data providers (another ridealong — see previous entries: 1, 2 — Navteq + New York this time). A big article that I believe has been in preparation for some months, and definitely worth a read.

Forbes.com has an article on the online mapping business that focuses, naturally, on the business side of things, namely, traffic and income. Some interesting tidbits:

• Traffic to online mapping sites is up 20 per cent over last year.
• Yahoo! Maps actually got more traffic than Google Maps in March: 20 million vs. 19.1 million (based on ComScore numbers).
• But MapQuest got more than both of them combined: 46.4 million.
• Navteq’s revenues are up 26 per cent year over year.

Via Cartography.

GISuser.com has posted the first part of a three-part series on the Google Maps API, specifically on version 2. The first part is an introduction which thankfully doesn’t appear to assume too much prior knowledge; parts two and three will go into further detail and AJAX and geocoding, respectively. Via Anything Geospatial.

See previous entries: Coding the Google Maps API; Google Maps Hacking Roundup.

Update, May 1: Part two is now up (via Anything Geospatial).

Over at Directions Magazine, Adena interviews a MapQuest manager, Christian Dwyer, about the company’s future directions. Included in her article is the following nugget: “MapQuest won’t be left behind: aerials are coming back in a future offering, as are ‘live maps’ with real time panning (a la Google Maps), and street level images, promises Dwyer.”

See previous entries: MapQuest’s Mobile Strategy; MapQuest (Finally) Has an API; MapQuest at 10; AP: MapQuest and the Competition; What’s MapQuest Up To?

The Cartography of Brazil in the Collections of the National Library is an online collection of more than 300 maps of Brazil and South America from the National Library of Portugal.

The main goal of this project was to make an inventory of the eighteenth-century maps of Brazil existing in the collections of the National Library in order to make them available to the public. The printed and manuscript maps were selected from the collections kept in the Map Department, the Prints and Drawings Department, and the Rare Books and Manuscript Department. The maps are dated from 1700 to 1822.

The project also generated a printed catalogue and an exhibition (in 2000-2001). The site is in English and Portuguese. Thanks, peacay.

Earlier this month, MapHist subscribers learned of the passing of Walter W. Ristow, the former Chief of the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. Ristow died aged 97 on April 3. Today’s Washington Post takes a look back at Ristow’s life and career, which not only included 32 years at the Geography and Map Division (11 as its chief), but also a wartime stint analysing maps for the Office of Military Intelligence. A road map enthusiast, he apparently completed a manuscript on the history of American road maps shortly before his death.

Update, April 18: See also the New York Times obituary.

Update, May 7: Another obituary from the La Crosse Tribune.

For the opening of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, today’s New York Times has a story about a collector and a very rare atlas:

[William] Reese plans to show “The American Atlas: A Geographical Description of the Whole Continent of America,” a first edition published by Thomas Jefferys of London in 1775, with 22 engraved maps. Some of the individual maps are extremely significant, including one by Henry Mouzon of North and South Carolina “with their Indian frontiers” and another of Virginia by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson (father of the future president).

What makes the atlas special is that it is still in book form.

“Jefferys atlases are constantly being broken up,” Mr. Reese said. “Parts of it are as valuable as the whole book.”

He won’t do that, he says, though it would be more lucrative. The atlases are too hard to find. (Coincidentally, the New York map dealer Paul Cohen, a partner with the firm Richard B. Arkway Inc., sold a later edition last year for $125,000. A month ago in London, Bonhams sold another one, from 1776, with some condition problems and a modern binding, for $96,963.) Mr. Reese is asking $165,000 for his atlas.

Via MapHist.

Capital News, the student newspaper of Carleton University’s journalism school, has a story about the imminent demise of paper topographic maps in Canada. (I suspect that link might not be permanent.) There’s nothing really new in this story: the Centre for Topographic Information’s director says that paper maps are obsolete; World of Maps’s Brad Green says, not so fast — just like the previous coverage of this story (see previous entries: Canadian Topo Map Update: CBC Coverage; Canadian Topo Map Update: Globe and Mail Coverage; Canadian Government Abandoning Paper Topo Maps?). Via Cartography.

Meanwhile, despite this move, it appears that the emerging conventional (if counterintuitive) wisdom is that digital mapping will actually increase the demand for paper maps, not decrease it. (In the same way, I suppose, that “paperless” offices actually increased the output of paper.) See, for example, this article from the Albany, NY, Business Review:

“We are concluding that the products you get on the Internet, such as MapQuest, are helping to educate people about maps,” she said. “So people who have never used a map before are inclined to check out something on MapQuest and it appears they are becoming acclimated to maps and going out and buying them.” …

Even dashboard GPS navigation systems wound up making people want maps more, instead of supplanting them, David Fisk said. …

“We’re seeing increases in all sales in all our product groups,” Chris Fisk said. “People are still buying paper maps and atlases, and probably more than ever before.”

Via All Points Blog.

The same point was also made by Jeff Thurston in this post in January: more printed maps, not less. Ed Parsons agrees.

Digital mapping is raising the profile of mapping, full stop; it’s not necessarily a zero-sum game. That decision to get out of paper topo maps looks a bit more shortsighted now, doesn’t it? But then we’re talking about the federal government, now, aren’t we?

Via Cartography, a stunning collection of maps depicting the paleogeography of North America.

The images presented here show the paleogeography of North America over the last 550 million years of geologic history. The 40 images shown here are selected from a suite of approximately 100 maps that are in time slices mostly 5-10 million years apart. By using such tightly spaced time slices, individual paleogeographic and tectonic elements can be followed and intuitively related from time slice to adjacent time slice. Because of space limitations only 40 of the 100 images are presented here but but most shifts of tectonic elements and depositional systems can still be followed.

More from BLDGBLOG. Matt Perry has taken the images and compiled a 7.2-MB animated GIF, cycling through the ages, as it were.

Satellite imagery was added to the Yahoo! Maps beta last night; high-resolution (1-metre) imagery is now available for the continental U.S.; the rest of the world must make do with medium-resolution (15-metre) imagery. Yahoo! says that they’ve also taken the time to process the imagery so that it doesn’t have the quilted appearance that Google’s satellite photos do, which is a nice touch. More from O’Reilly Radar and Cartography.

See previous entry: Yahoo! Maps Upgrade.

Update, April 17: More from the Monkey Bites blog, which also notes other improvements to the Yahoo! Maps interface and feature set.

Our friend Tony Campbell has added a page about map quotations to his Map History/History of Cartography site; the page doesn’t list individual quotations about maps, but points to sources where they may be found online. (He should probably add WikiQuote to that list; if and when they get search working properly you should be able to search for map-related terms and find some gems.)

Do you know any good map-related quotations? Share them in the comments.

Tim Tierney writes, “I heard that there was a feature about online mapping services that aired on 4-7-06 [i.e., Friday] on one of the morning TV news shows (possibly ‘Good Morning America’ or the ‘Today Show’) but I can’t find it. Do you have any information about this?” I couldn’t find it either; neither network’s web site seems to allow for in-show searching (these programs are lumped in with the rest of their news bureaus). Did anyone see this?

BBC News: “Drivers following satellite navigation systems through a village called Crackpot have been directed along a track at the edge of a 100-ft cliff.” Another entry in the annals of errors made by in-car navigation systems. Via Slashgeo.

See previous entries: Getting Lost with Mapping Sites; Good Maps, Bad Maps.

Cabspotting, which went live on Thursday, generates a real-time map of taxi movements by displaying the last four hours of trips by GPS-equipped taxicabs in San Francisco. (For some reason this reminds me of the cell phone map of Graz I posted about last September.) Don’t miss the time-lapse animations. Via Boing Boing and Cartography.

A tutorial on setting up GPS tracking on a Treo 650 using a Bluetooth receiver, the Internet via the cellular network, and some software. Via Slashgeo.

On the Mapping Hacks blog, Schuyler Erle takes a look at the “big three” online mapping APIs: “The big three — Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Virtual Earth — have basically converged, and their map display APIs look more or less alike, implementation details aside.” He makes a particularly interesting point about what come next (or what doesn’t), and the essential sameness of map mashups:

The one thing no one is offering quite yet is a clear view of the next stage of the game. At present, all that these map APIs offer is ultimately a way to put points on a map — what we’ve for years half-jokingly referred to as “red dot fever”. With the pre-rendered map layers offered by the Google/Y!/MSN services, we’re stuck with a limited range of map styles; with, in essence, the view of the world that these companies see fit to present. More to the point, where is the broader palette for telling new and different stories on the Web with maps? Where is the bidirectionality, the interactivity, the wiki nature? In this respect, I think I see in projects like OpenStreetMap and Community MapBuilder (to name just two) the embryonic beginnings of the next revolution in maps on the Web.

You’ll recall that it was previously reported that MapQuest was responding to the challenge posed by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! by moving in an altogether different direction: instead of a hackable API, satellite imagery and web interface innovations (although an API did show up last month), it was going to focus on expanding its reach away from the computer: to paper maps and mobile devices.

This week we saw a bit more of that mobile strategy, as MapQuest made two announcements related to mobile phones. First, MapQuest Navigator, which makes use of certain phones’ built-in GPS to provide maps and spoken turn-by-turn directions. Not yet released; pricing to be determined by the carriers (but MapQuest is hoping for something like $4/month). Second, a more traditional WAP-based interface, for phones with built-in web browsing, was also announced; it’s free (except, of course, for what your carrier charges you).

For more details, see CNet, Reuters (also reprinted at Yahoo!), GPS Review, GPS Lodge and GPS News.

Not exactly a map, but it’s close enough — it’s a city model, right? — and it’s cool: San Francisco in Jell-O (see also).

Bleeker compass by blueneurosis

John Emerson notes that you can get disoriented when you come out of a subway (I’ve noticed this too, especially in places like Paris that aren’t built on a grid) and proposes a guerrilla wayfinding campaign — stencilling compass roses on sidewalks, for example. Coincidentally or not, that very thing is starting to turn up.

Still another profile of a digital mapping data provider’s employees as they survey the streets of (insert your town name here): this time it’s Navteq in San Diego. Via Cartography, with whom I’m in agreement: where are all these stories coming from? Is this the typical media pack mentality (i.e., they all simultaneously decide that something makes a good story — it does happen without collusion) or is there a definite PR offensive on the companies’ part (and if so, to what purpose)?

See previous entries: Another Profile: Navteq in New York; TeleAtlas in Santa Fe; More on Digital Map Field Researchers; CNet Profiles TeleAtlas; SF Chronicle: Digital Map Field Researchers; Backcountry Mapping; Online Maps’ Foot Soldiers.

Euratlas, a map store, has a collection of 18th- and 19th-century maps of Europe at two zoom levels; the detail is just transfixing. At right, detail from an 1852 map of post roads and railways in and around Germany. Other maps include Turkey, Switzerland, Italy, and various bits of Germany, among other places. Via Boing Boing.

Martin Brückner’s book, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity, looks at the rise in geographic literacy in the colonial and post-independence periods and the the cultural impact of that literacy. It’s now out in paperback. A profile of Brückner and his book was put out today by the University of Delaware’s PR service; Brückner’s a professor of English there.

• Buy The Geographic Revolution in Early America at Amazon.com

Last Friday, The Map Room turned three years old. I’m not making much of a fuss this year (compared to last year, when I simultaneously launched a reader survey and a webhosting-bill fundraising drive, and posted an essay in honour of the event); I’ve been a little busy and a lot under the weather (the usual reason: a seasonal flareup of my ankylosing spondylitis) — and besides, I think it’s a bit unseemly to make a big pitch for funds when the site is well-covered with advertising. (Still, hosting donations and text ads are never unappreciated. There. Done.)

At some point, though, when I’ve got a moment, I’ll probably do another reader survey to see if things have changed much in the past year. And I’ve been mulling over an essay about the state of the mapping blogosphere. If my posting history is any indication, though, I shouldn’t promise either by any fixed date.

More geotagging coverage. Tim’s page covers the steps involved in taking photos from a GPS-compatible digital camera (in this case, the droolworthy Nikon D200) and placing them on a Google Map; with source code (via Google Maps Mania). On the other hand, sure, you could add GPS to a camera, but you could also just add a camera to a GPS receiver (via MAKE: Blog).

I’ve previously mentioned David Rumsey and his eponymous web site, an online repository of thousands of digitized maps from his even larger private collection. But yesterday Paul (aka peacay) wrote to say that the site had added more than a thousand more maps to the collection a couple of weeks back. And, as it turns out, about once or twice a year they add between 700 and 1,200 maps to the site, all in one go. This page summarizes the recent additions and provides a link to browse them all.

See previous entries: David Rumsey Profile; More Map Podcasts.

• Buy Cartographica Extraordinaire at Amazon.com

It’s been in development for a while, but version 2 of the Google Maps API was officially released today. Besides technical improvements such as a smaller JavaScript codebase, Google has lifted the page view limits and has promised 90 days’ warning before their advertising starts appearing in Google Maps mashups.

And speaking of ads and Google, it was reported last week that ads had come to Google Maps for real (see previous entries: 1, 2, 3), but only when searching for a related product or service. And not just ads, but ads with images in them — and possibly even more interactivity in the future.

I haven’t covered geotagging — adding location data to digital photos (and then doing neat things with that data) — as much as I’d like to, and I’ve got a lot of links on the subject gathering dust in my files. But in the meantime here are a couple of recent items worth mentioning.

The first step in any geotagging enterprise is to add latitude and longitude data to the photo. Once that’s done, you’ve got several options. Many people (myself included) use Flickr for sharing online photos; it’s easy to tag the photos, so it’s easy for geotagging services to use Flickr as a starting point. (They also tend to use Google Maps, whereas Flickr is now owned by Yahoo!; you may safely assume that any “official” geotagging service from either Google or Yahoo! will break that link.)

But to tag your photos with lat/long coordinates, you have to know them — so you have to find them in a mapping service and plunk them in manually. This page automates it somewhat: you find your location on the included (mashed-up) Google Map, and copy the tags and description (it creates a link to a Google Map location) over to your Flickr photo. Via Flickr’s Cartography group.

Meanwhile, Richard wrote me last night to tell me about his page on geocoding photos, which points to some of the more automatic ways of geocoding photos rather than manually adding them: built-in camera interfaces, cellphones, GPS receivers. The upshot is that we probably won’t have to geotag our photos forever; we’ll expect our cameras to do it for us.

A couple of address changes to tell you about. Glen reports that his new Anything Geospatial blog (previous entry) can be reached from the easier-to-remember URL of anygeo.com. On a similar note, James has moved Planet Geospatial, his geospatial blog aggregator, to a new URL, the much shorter planetgs.com.

Does this mean I have to change my URL too? I hope not.