Gary Gale

One of the things we loose in today's up to date maps on the web and on our mobiles is how things used to be; the temporal problem of digital maps for want of a better phrase. It's not that there's no data on the past, it just doesn't surface very often.

But sometimes the data does surface and then people make maps of what used to be. Take the British Empire for example. When I went to school in the early 1970's there were maps of the world in almost every class room and they were old maps. Whether down to a lack of funding or as a reminder of what Britain used to be, these maps still showed the extent of the empire, in a pale shade of reddish-pink.

And now for something completely different; a post which has only the most tenuous of a link to maps. Instead and because it's Friday, this post concentrates on my second favourite obsession after maps. That can only be the dark brown, almost black, water of life we know as coffee.

As a direct follow on from Thierry Gregorius' helpful guide to work out what the tools you use to make maps say about you, I offer up, courtesy of the Doghouse Diaries, another helpful guide. This time it's what your coffee says about you.

Crowd sourcing data is a laudable approach. Crowd sourcing data and putting it one a map seems like a good idea. Crowd sourcing data and putting it on a map without any verification or checks? You might not end up with what you originally intended.

This is a lesson that Benadryl, the hay fever medication, has sadly learned the hard way. At first sight it seems innocuous enough; a hay fever relief brand teams up with the UK's Met Office to crowd source areas where there's a high pollen count.

Finally Summer has arrived in London just in time to coincide with the annual population exodus known as the summer holidays. But wait. When you arrive at your holiday destination, how do you order a beer? If you're lucky, you'll remember some rudimentary French or Spanish from your school days. But what about other languages? Surely there's a map for this essential information?

Luckily and to paraphrase the mantra of there's an app for that, there's also a map for that. Whether it's beer, bier, cerveza, pivo, birra or øl, this handy guide to beer throughout Europe and its environs will help you get that first cold beer of the holiday into your hands.

If you live in a city for any period of time, you form a mental image of what quantifies certain areas or neighbourhoods. If someone mentions, say, posh London, I instantly think of the area around Mayfair and Knightsbridge. But you could put this personal and biased view on a map?

It turns out Yelp has done just that, producing a heat map of my home city of all the reviews that mention posh. It looks pretty much as I'd imagine.