There's a saying that travel broadens the mind. It's a cliche but cliches generally come about because they're true. This week my mind has been considerably broadened, visting the Tandale slum on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam and attending and judging the Sanitation Hackathon, but more about that in a later post.

The week started in Chicago, the Windy City, which lived up to its name, being cold, windy and with crystal clear skies. It's a classic example of the American style of high rise architecture and the view from one of the meeting rooms in Nokia's offices were spectacular.

There's a phrase in Latin that goes errare humanum est which roughly translates as everyone makes mistakes. This is true of so many things and maps are no exception. However much we try to make today's maps as authentic, up to date and accurate as we can, the occasional mistake slips in; it's more a case of when rather than if.

But if you find a mistake in a map, is it really a mistake or it is a deliberate error, placed there as a copyright trap to provide evidence of the origin of a copied map? This is a vague area at best. Some map makers are up front about this.

When you're on the inside of an industry looking in, you take a lot of things for granted. You fling terminology, acronyms and slang around, safe and secure in the knowledge that your audience knows exactly what you're talking about. But when you're on the edges of an industry, or even on the outside, looking in, all of a sudden that terminology becomes opaque, those acronyms obscure and that slang becomes misleading. When you're on the inside, looking in, you forget all of this and sometimes all it takes is a simple question to ground you and remind you of this.

And so it was with my post on neogeography being removed from wikipedia; a flurry of email conversations with friends and colleagues resulted which can be paraphrased succinctly as "neo? paleo? WTF?". I tried to write down the background to all of this geographic storm in a teacup, but that only served to confuse matters. So, with the caveat that this may end up fanning the flames rather than putting them out, in the end I came up with the following venn diagram to explain.