Nothing on the interwebs is forever. Services start up and either become successful, get acquired or shut down. If they shut down they usually end up in TechCrunch's deadpool. The same applies for APIs and when they finally go offline, they usually end up in the Programmable Web deadpool.

At around 1.30 PM London time yesterday, the Yahoo! Maps API got added to the Programmable Web deadpool for good. Despite the announcement I wrote about last year that it was being shutdown on September 13, 2011, up until yesterday the API was very much alive and well and still serving up map tiles, markers and polylines via JavaScript.

If any industry sector is uniquely poised to benefit from the triumvirate of social, local and mobile, it's the classified listings industry. The last time I spoke about whether do embrace SoLoMo or just embrace social, local and mobile I cautioned against the tick in the box approach and against adopting new technologies just because you're exhorted to.

But at first glance, a business running classified listings does seem to put all the right ticks in all the right boxes.

Firstly local. Classifieds are inherently local, offering a way for local businesses and individuals to offer ... stuff ... to other local people. Implementing a local strategy needs your mainstay offering to have a strong geolocation quotient and what could be more local or more geolocation than addresses and postal codes?

Then there's mobile. Most classifieds businesses have either fully or partially transitioned from print to online and if you already have an online presence, you're more than half way to having a mobile online presence.

Finally there's social. Again, there's a strong affinity with classifieds. Nothing spreads faster than word of mouth reputation and harnessing the power of social media to allow people to say "hey, I just found this really cool stuff" is a compelling case for social.

So when the International Classified Media Association, the ICMA, asked me to talk about SoLoMo at their Social, Local, Mobile: Classified Media Strategies conference in Instanbul last week it was an ideal opportunity to see whether my preconceptions to be skeptical about SoLoMo were borne out in practise or whether I'd just overdone the cynicism a bit too much.

Back in July, I wrote about Big (Location) Data vs. My (Location) Data, which was the theme for a talk I gave at the AGI Northern Conference. The TL;DR premise behind the talk was that the location trail we generate on today's interweb is part of our own digital history and that there's a very one sided relationship between the people who generate this digital stuff and the organisations that aim to make money out of our digital stuff.

Once I'd given that talk, done the usual blog write up and posted it, I considered the topic done and dusted and I moved onto the next theme. But as it turns out, the topic was neither done, nor dusted.

Firstly Eric van Rees from Geoinformatics magazine mailed me to say he'd liked the write up and would I consider crunching down 60 odd slides and 3000 odd words into a 750 word maximum column for the next issue of the magazine.

Ah ... art. Art is a contentious area for discussion. One person's work of art is another person's random spots of paint on a canvas. As Rudyard Kipling once put it, "it's clever, but is it art?".

Even artists can't seem to agree on this topic. Compare and contrast Picasso's comment that "everything you can imagine is real" with Warhol's contrarian stance that "an artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have".

Now add maps into the equation and you have a debate where people probably won't always agree. So it was with a conversation on Twitter between myself, Steve Chilton, chair of the Society of Cartographers and psychogeographer Graham Hooper. We were talking about a map like this one ...

This is post number six in the ongoing #mapgasm series of posts on maps found on the interwebs that I like. Yes, it's another map. Yes, it's another Tube map. I make no apologies for this.

A simple map is often a good map. Cutting away cartographical clutter can reveal the heart of what a map is trying to show. But sometimes you can maybe take the map pruning just a little bit too far. Take the map of the London Underground; surely one of the simplest and more effective maps there is. Surely there's not much scope for making it any simpler?

I've said it before, many times, but I'm a 100% un-reconstructed map addict and make no apology for it. I've said this in posts I've written on this blog as well as using it as part of my introduction for talks at conferences. This post is a slightly more long winded version of why I am the map addict that I am.

I grew up in the suburbs of London. For as long as I can remember, every week day morning my father picked up his briefcase and walked to the local British Rail station (for this was way before the privatisation of the British rail network) and went to the fantastical place, to a child's mind at least, called Central London where he worked. He went there on a train. Which was amazing and wonderful to me at the time. I knew he worked in Central London because he had a book of maps of all the streets in Central London. It was old, dog-eared and probably out of date but it made the journey to and from work with him every day and I used to look at it in the evenings, after he'd come home for the day. This mystical and wondrous book was called the London A-Z. It looked something like this.

Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, who was awarded the Turing Prize in 1972 is reported to have once said ...

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

With this in mind, if the process of taking geographical information and making this into a map is called mapping ... what do you call the opposite, the process where you take a map and deconstruct it back to what makes up the map in the first place.

Un-mapping? Anti-mapping? De-atlasing? Whatever you call it, you start out with a map and you end up with an oddly compelling form of art. Which is just what French artist Armelle Caron has been doing.

Start with the map. Let's take a map of Berlin. If you've spent any time in this city, the map will look pretty familiar. It's not the most granular or small scale of maps, but that doesn't matter. What happens next is most definitely art and is akin to magic.