So farewell Sir Terry Pratchett. Since I first read The Colour Of Magic in 1983 you made me smile, you made me laugh out loud and above all, you always made me think.

In 2004's Going Postal, Terry wrote about the clacks, a series of semaphore towers that were the Discworld equivalent of the old telegraph system. There was a tradition that when a clacks worker dies in the line of duty, their name would be sent home by being transmitted up and down the line in the signalling layer of the clacks message protocol.

I've been thinking a lot about the etymology of place names recently. That's a slightly verbose way of saying that I've been thinking about the origin of place names and where they come from. Take London for example. That's pretty easy as most sources of information seem to agree that London derives from Londinium, the name of the Roman settlement from which the modern metropolis of London grew.

Then there's Teddington, the town on the River Thames at the upstream limit of the Tideway, where I currently live. Some people believe that the name derives from Tide's End Town; Rudyard Kipling was one of the people who subscribed to this version of the name's origin. Scholars though tend to believe that the town was named after a Saxon leader, called either Todyngton or Tutington, which morphed into the modern day name over the centuries.

I should start off by saying that I don't mean mapping web sites. There's no Ovi, Yahoo!, Google or OpenStreetMap web sites in this post. No, this is a blog post about Eddie Izzard (at least slightly), Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (even more ephmerally), the (death of) RSS, maps and cartography (generally) and (in the main) web sites about maps and cartography.

A strange set of bedfellows you might think (you might also think I've been overdosing on LISP as there's way way too many parentheses in the first two paragraphs alone) ... but bear with me.

Eddie Izzard, in his Dress To Kill stage show ("cake or death"), was musing on the way in which people perceive history and this got me to thinking about RSS. But first, this is what he said ...

Yes, and I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from. Oh, yeah. You tear your history down, man! “30 years old, let's smash it to the floor and put a car park here!" I have seen it in stories. I saw something in a program on something in Miami, and they were saying, "We've redecorated this building to how it looked over 50 years ago!" And people were going, "No, surely not, no. No one was alive then!"

It may have escaped your notice but London is pretty much map mad at the moment. If it's not documentaries on the BBC it's exhibitions of maps at the British Library.

Which seems an apt and fitting time to organise an ad-hoc, impromptu, totally unofficial gathering of latent geographers, geo-wonks, map-nerds, professional cartographers and anyone else who likes maps.

Fully intending to use the week off that I have between leaving my role in the Geo Technologies group of Yahoo! and starting my role as [redacted] with [redacted] in [redacted], I'm going to be going to the Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art exhibition at the British Library in the afternoon of Wednesday 2nd. June 2010, followed by a few geobeers in a local hostelry and a cheeky curry afterwards.

Most browsers have a variation on the theme of a home page, which automagically loads your favourite web page when you start the browser or open a new browser window or tab.

A lot of web sites try to capitalise on this, offering earnest entreaties to "make me your home page" ... "no make me your home page" ... "no, choose me for your home page, I have so much personalised content".

They're needy and somewhat neurotic entities these web sites, it's not like I can have all of them as my home page.

Most of them personalise their content for you, based on a registration setting or some other insight, to give you what they think is the information your looking for.

This is not creepy.