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.