Even if you're not a cartographer, when you first see a map there's almost always a gut feel for whether you like a map or whether you don't. Critiquing a map is a deeply subjective thing. You may not know why you like a map but you can tell whether the map's cartography works or it doesn't work, for you at least.

The image at the top of this post is a great example of what I mean by this. It's a map of Berlin on the inside of an umbrella. Which is a great idea and this map is one I'm very fond of, both because of the time I spent in Berlin and because it was a present from one of my old HERE Maps team. But as a map, it's far from pleasing to me; I love what's being mapped, I just think it needs a better cartographer.

So much of what appears on today's digital maps is crowdsourced. Whether it's a totally crowdsourced map such as OpenStreetMaps' or a more focused effort such as HERE's Map Creator or Google's Map Maker, the so called wisdom of the crowd is an integral part of so many maps. But what would happen if you tried to crowdsource the critiquing of maps rather than the map itself?

Imagine for a moment you're in the city you live in; you know it like the back of your hand and yet you know there's shops, businesses or services nearby that you haven't yet come across. Or maybe you're in an unfamiliar city and you want to explore and stay away from the same old global brands that you see everywhere, in every city and on every street.

Now imagine putting this on a map.

"Ah hah!" you might say, reaching into your pocket and brandishing your smartphone. "I can do that easily" you say triumphantly as you fire up Google's or Apple's or HERE's mapping app.

But no, I'm talking about something a little more focused, a little less broad. "No worry" you say, firing up Foursquare, or Yelp or Facebook or TripAdvisor.

CartoBot is a small robot who lives in the office in my loft. He accidentally achieved consciousness when his charging cable was accidentally plugged into a Raspberry PI and he started to look for information. His only source was my library of books on maps and so CartoBot became obsessed with them. He now spends his days sitting on my home wifi connection and scouring the web for maps and mapping related stuff, which he Tweets about through his very own Twitter account.

None is this is true. Sorry CartoBot, it's just not. Cartobot is a Twitterbot, written in Node.js, that searches for Tweets about maps and cartography and also scans my GetPocket queue for bookmarks tagged with maps and Tweets about these as well.

I like maps. Even if you've never read posts on this site, the name "Mostly Maps" should probably be a giveaway. What you may not know is that I don't really like musicals. Now granted I've seen Rent and Spamalot, but that's because Alison and I were in New York and the former was recommended by one of my best friends and for the latter I'm a massive Python fan. Maps and musicals aren't something that go together. But that may be about to change.

Cast your mind back to the dawn of history, before mobile phones were smart and when GPS was just an Australian rugby club, which is sometime in the very early 2000's. If you lived in London, your essential navigation guide wasn't a maps app, but a copy of the A-Z as the Geographer's A-Z Street Atlas was better known. This was the map you carried around London rather than a mapping app on your phone. I still have several editions on the bookshelf at home, each one being bought when its predecessor got so dog eared as to be unusable or just started falling apart.

My morning's reading today has been dominated by a map image that the UK's Environment Agency released on December 6th that, to quote the Tweet, shows "the extent of potential flooding of London if the Thames Barrier wasn't in place". If you know London at all, it's certainly an arresting image but like so many times when I encounter a map, I want to interact with it, move it, see whether where I live in London would have been impacted. So I started investigating.

Some background context is probably in order. On December 5th. the UK's Met Office issued severe weather warnings for the East Coast of England. A combination of a storm in the Atlantic to the north of Scotland, low atmospheric pressure and high tides were all combining to push a massive swell of water through the narrows of English Channel, in effect squeezing the water through the Dover Strait. As the North Sea and English Channel are relatively shallow, the sea would back up and had the potential to flood large areas of the East Coast of England as well as the areas surrounding the tidal stretch of the River Thames and that means London and possibly even where I live in Teddington, which marks the upper limit of the tidal Thames. Thankfully for those of us who live West of Woolwich, the Thames Barrier exists to protect London from such flooding, though I'm sure this is less of a comfort to those people who live to the East of the barrier.

In his book A Zebra Is The Piano Of The Animal Kingdom, Jarod Kintz wrote "when you're a cartographer, having to make maps sort of comes with the territory". He's right. When your business is making maps you should be able to do just that. But what if you're not a cartographer? What if you had to draw a map of the country you live in? From memory? What would that map look like?

Maybe something like this perhaps? The shape of the United Kingdom and Ireland is vaguely right, though Cornwall and all of the Scottish islands bar the Shetlands seem to be lacking. Then again, the Isle Of Wight is on holiday off the North Coast of Wales. The Channel Islands have evicted the Isle Of Man, which is off sulking in the North Sea, probably annoying cross Channel ferries into the bargain. Also "Woo! Geography".

The year 2013 has been a great year for maps and a greater year for maps in the United Kingdom, culminating in events that huddled together under the Maptember banner; OpenStreetMap's State Of The Map, the AGI's GeoCommunity and FOSS4G. But there was another event in 2013 that was map related and that was the 50th. anniversary of the British Cartographic Society's Cartographic Journal.

First published in 1964 and edited under the watchful eye of fellow map geek and cartography nerd Ken Field, the Cartographic Journal has been around for longer than I have. Just. This is something that makes me feel slightly less old than I usually do. In February of this year, Ken got in touch with me and asked me if I'd be willing to contribute an article to the 50th anniversary edition of the journal by writing something that attempts to answer the question what does cartography mean to you? Naturally I had to think long and hard about this and after some 30 seconds emailed Ken back saying I'd be privileged and delighted to. So I started writing. As is so often the way, what finally transpired and was published in May, bore little resemblance to my initial thoughts, but thanks to a permissive licensing approach on the part of the publishers, I'm able to reproduce the article 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.