Gary Gale

These days there's so many ways that you can make a map. You can use a Javascript Maps API and put push pins on a slippy map. You can take vector data, transform it into JSON and use a different Javascript API to make an SVG map. You can load data from pretty much any source into either a desktop GIS or a visualisation tool. The possibilities are endless; maybe more endless than you might first assume.

Thierry Gregorius has helpfully put together a cut out and keep guide to which type of mapper you are.

Like most people, my email Inbox gets hit with a lot of spam on a daily basis. Most of this is caught by my email client's junk mail filtering, but some gets through. Most of it is, at face value, auto generated; phishing attempts for bank accounts I don't have or solicitations for advance fee fraud.

But there's also been a recent spike in people wanting me to embed infographics or links into one of my sites that the sender thinks my readers might like. Most of these are so off target as to be ignored, but sometimes there's a mail that seems to have come from a human and might even be relevant to what I write about, but that just fails on so many levels. This is one such email, redacted to save the originating sender and company from any embarrassment.

Last night I made another map. It tries to answer some of more perplexing and confusing facets of the geography surrounding the world's 9th largest island. I mean of course Great Britain. No, wait. I mean the United Kingdom. No, wait. I mean Britain. Or do I mean England? See, it's confusing.

• So if the ISO 3166-2 code is GBR, how come the country is called the United Kingdom?
• But if England is a country and the United Kingdom is a country, how come England is part of the United Kingdom?
• What about Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

This isn't the first time I've covered this topic. The first time was for a post on the now defunct Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog entitled UK Addressing, The Non Golden Rules Of Geo Or Help! My Country Doesn't Exist. The ygeoblog.com domain is now long gone and redirects to the Yahoo! corporate blog but I was able to reproduce this post here and it's also captured in the Internet Archive's WayBackMachine. The second time was when I made a variation of The Great British Venn Diagram. But this is the first time (though probably not the last) that I've used a map, which is odd as this is something that's tailor-made for a map.

Over the weekend I made another map. While I don't think for one moment this one will be as wildly popular as my last map was, this one is just as satisfying and a whole lot more personal.

At 8.01 PM on the 11th. of October 2009 I checked into Sushi Tomi in Mountain View, California. This was my very first Foursquare check-in. Since then I've checked-in on this particular location based service a further 12,394 times. Each check-in has been at a place I've visited. As this is a location based service, each check-in comes with a longitude and latitude.

This sounded to me like an ideal candidate for a map. But how to go about making one?

Most maps are pointers to something; from today's turn-by-turn voice guided navigation to the "X marks the spot" treasure maps of legend.

This map however, is not a pointer to riches, instead it's made of riches.

A large-scale, unique and intricate portrait of our Earth - a planet which is surely a jewel of the universe - innovatively created from 330,000 hand-cut pieces of stained glass, 1238 jewels totalling 260 carats, and over 6900 LEDs.

Last week's 10,00 ton and 55 feet's worth of meteor that exploded over and hit the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in the Urals made several thoughts go through my mind. In this order.

1. I feel for the 1200 people who were hurt and injured
2. Thank goodness it didn't happen where I live
3. With all the asteroids and smaller pieces of rock zooming over our head, this has got to have happened before, hasn't it?

Back in 2010, when I left Yahoo! to go and join Nokia, I wrote some words that at the time seemed full of hope for the future of the Geotechnologies group I'd left.

I’ll continue to use my core set of Yahoo! products, tools and APIs … YQL, Placemaker, GeoPlanet, WOEIDs, YUI, Flickr and Delicious. Not because I used to work for Yahoo! but because they’re superb products.

Time and changes of corporate heart have not been kind here. Maybe it's time to take a look at the state of the geo union.

A lot of great conferences in the UK happen in London. But not all great conferences. For some, you have to travel a little further afield. Maybe to East Anglia. Or more specifically to Norwich, the county town of Norfolk. If you were in Norwich last week, you might have noticed that SyncConf was taking place and I'd been asked by ex-MultiMapper and co-founder of SyncConf, John Fagan to do a talk on something related to maps. How could I refuse?

SyncConf isn't a maps conference or a geo conference; it's a tech conference for the city's tech and startup community. So it seemed to make sense not to go full-on maps nerd for the conference audience but instead look at how we got to the current state of play where the digital map has become ubiquitous. It also allowed me to the opportunity to put a little bit of map porn into a slide deck.

This is how it turned out .. my slide deck and notes follow after the break.