Old maps can be valuable. Old maps that show key parts of history, such as "I got here first", are valuable. Old maps that seem to show that someone else got there first are extremely valuable and can verge on priceless. The prospect of large amounts of money and potential fame can make faking a map that says "you didn't get there first, someone else did" a very attractive proposition. But if you're going to fake a map, there's right ways to do it and there's wrong ways to do it.

It seems that maps that show that Columbus didn't get to the Americas first hold a particular fascination for map faking. Back in June of this year I wrote about the debunking of the map of Vinland which purported to show that a Norse expedition, led by Leif Ericson, got to Newfoundland in the 11th Century.

Of course the Vikings didn't discover the Americas 300 years before Columbus, it was the Chinese some 70 years before Columbus. At least that's what the somewhat controversial historian Gavin Menzies claims in a book which doesn't pull any punches in its title ... Who Discovered America?.

We've become firmly accustomed to the instant gratification of Internet Time, which can be roughly summarised as "I want it now, dammit". Nowhere is this more evident than in maps. If something is wrong on a map, we expect it to be fixed. Now. Ten or so years ago, it would be common to wait somewhere between 12 and 18 months for a map's updates to be collected, validated and published. These days, thanks to our modern digital maps, we get our updates in more or less Internet Time and that means fast. It hasn't always been that way.

Although waiting over a year for a map update seems almost unthinkable now, consider for a moment having to wait almost half a century for a map to be updated. Yet this is what happened in the curious cartographical case of the Island of California.

I should state up front that I've been to California, quite a few times. The weather is fine (apart from San Francisco's fog), it's home to the technical hub of Silicon Valley and the local food and wine are rather good. It is most definitely not an island and what's more, there's a distinct lack of tribes of beautiful Amazonian warriors wielding gold tools and weaponry. Yet in 1510, Spanish author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo published a novel entitled Las Sergas de Esplandián, or The Adventures Of Esplandián, which mentions the Island of California, populated by the aforementioned female warriors. The name and concept of an island stuck and early Spanish explorers of what we now call Baja California were convinced the new territory they had found was part of the Island of California.

In retrospect, early maps of the New World actually got the geography of California right. Both Mercator, he of web map projection controversy, in 1538 and Ortelius, in 1570, made maps that correctly showed California as a peninsula.

Despite Transport for London owning the copyright (and enforcing it) on Harry Beck's iconic map of the London Underground network, people just won't stop creating variants of the map. I may have written about these once, twice, three or even more times. But now, there's a reworking of the Tube map to possibly end all Tube maps reworks.

At first sight, surely it's yet another Tube map rework? Quirky and amusing line names in the right colours? Check. Station names that aren't the current station names? Check. Faithfully reproducing the line layout? Check.

But then you dig deeper and discover that this isn't just another Tube map rework, it's a Tube map of Tube map reworks. Each station is assigned one of the other Tube map reworks that today's Interwebs seem to be full of. Each line tries to categorise the Tube map reworks into some, albeit subjective, categorisation.

Yesterday I took the S-Bahn from my local train station in the suburbs of London. At the terminus at Wasserklo I took the Nördlich U-Bahn Linie to Königskreuz St. Pankraz, changing onto the Städtich Linie and finally alighted at Grashügel. No. Wait. That's not right.

What I actually did was take the South West Trains suburban line into London Waterloo, hopped on the Northern Line to King's Cross St. Pancras and then changed onto the Metropolitan Line and got off at Farringdon. What's going on here?

Today is the 7th. of Maptember 2013 and that means I should be in Birmingham for the OpenStreetMap State Of The Map conference. But I'm not; I'm still at home in the suburbs of South West London. But I will still be appearing at SOTM. Virtually.

Due to the age old cliche of circumstances beyond my control, I can't be in Birmingham this weekend, despite submitting How To Make A Map Go Viral (In 8 Easy Steps) as a talk for the SOTM conference. But thanks to the wonders of modern digital technology, in other words, a screencast, my talk is still on the conference schedule, even if I'm not.

The talk is an update to one of the same title that I gave at London's GeoMob back in April of this year and was submitted to the SOTM committee with this abstract ...

In February of 2013 I mashed up a geocoded list of global place names and made a map of them using nothing more than Stamen's OSM based Toner tile-set and the Leaflet maps API. I then promptly forgot about it. But Twitter had other ideas and the Vaguely Rude Place Names map went viral resulting in a month's worth of media madness. This is the story of how the map came to be and what happened when traditional media met social media ... on a map. It's also the story of how the combination of rude names, innuendo and maps briefly appealed to people the world over.

When I learned that I wouldn't be able to go to Birmingham, the conference organisers kindly suggested that maybe I might want to pre-record my talk instead. Which is just what I've done. You'll see it embedded below.

If there's one thing that stands out more than a map that says "you are here", it's a map that says "you are here" and seems to get the map wrong.

It has to be said, short haul European flights are a bit on the boring side. Once you've read the day's newspaper, had a drink and a snack and read a few chapters of a book there's not much else to do. Most airlines that hop between European destinations don't have inflight wifi yet and there's no inflight entertainment to be had, except to watch your progress towards your destination on the map that appears on the screen over your head.

So it was with this map, which was snapped on a flight a few days ago from Rome's Fiumicino airport to London's Heathrow was coming to a close. But there's something wrong with this map.

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.