On the way through South Kensington Tube station this morning, I spied a new Underground map. That's nothing new, the Underground map seems to be changing frequently these days. But this map was very noticeably different.

There was no Victoria or Jubilee lines at all. The Piccadilly line terminated at Hammersmith and Finsbury Park and had stations that have been closed for years; Brompton Road, Down Street and York Road. The Central Line stopped at Liverpool Street.

Governments and authorities like maps. They're a useful way of clearly saying this is mine, that is yours. They're also useful for saying where you can and more importantly, where you can't go. This is all too evident in a surprising map of where Russian visitors to the US were permitted to visit during the 1950s.

In the mid 1950s America and Russia were in the middle of the game of oneupmanship, with added nuclear weapons, that was the Cold War. Despite the uneasy detente between the two countries, if you were one of an elite group of Soviet citizens you were actually able to visit the United States. But not all of it. Large swathes of the US were closed to prospective Soviet tourists.

In January of this year I made a hopeful prediction that 2013 would be the year of the tangible map.

This hope was prompted by the maps I saw at one of London's geomob meetups in November of 2012, where I saw and, importantly for a tangible map, touched Anna Butler's London wall map and a prototype of David Overton's SplashMap.

The hopeful prediction was made as a result of literally getting my hands on one of Anna's London maps and it's a treasured possession, though still sadly needing a suitable frame before it can take pride of place on a wall at home.

But what of SplashMaps? In November 2012 the project was on Kickstarter and I was one of the investors in this most tangible of maps. In December 2012 Splashmaps met their funding targets and went into production and today, through the letterbox came my own, tangible, foldable, scrunchable and almost indestructible SplashMap of my local neighbourhood.

Back in February of this year, at the height of the madness that was the Vaguely Rude Places Map, Ed Freyfogle from London's #geomob meetup got in touch and asked me to come and tell the story behind the map. This is that story.

And so last night, in the Chadwick Lecture Theatre in the basement of London's UCL, after listening to some amazing presentations on building a map of mobile cell tower coverage, of building a seismically powered alternative to GPS and a whole host of other great talks, I took my place on the podium and started where any good story needs to start ... at the beginning.

This is another mass transit map, but this time it's not of the London Underground system, but the U-Bahn and S-Bahn system in Berlin. The name U-Bahn derives from Untergrundbahn, or underground railway whilst S-Bahn comes from Stadtschnellbahn, or fast city train.

As a general rule of thumb, the London Underground is, as the name suggests, underground in the centre of the city and surfaces as you move into the suburbs. The same can't be said of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, which is underground and overground in pretty much equal measures over a lot of the network.

But this post is not about the official map of Berlin's transport, it's about this, unofficial, map of Berlin's underground and not so underground trains.

Oh yes, look. Gary's written yet another post about a map of the London Tube system that he likes. Yawn. Time to move on. But wait ... this may look like a map of the London Underground but it's not.

Now I may have been guilty of wearing my heart on my sleeve slightly too much where variations on a theme of the London Underground map have been concerned; there's at least seven posts on this topic already posted.

Granted, there's the Northern Line on the map; but this is more for a sense of geographical perspective than anything else.

Today I contributed to a map. I did this yesterday as well. I even did this last week. In fact I've been doing this since the end of July 2009. As of right now I've done this 11,880 times. I'll probably end up contributing to this map again later on today and will almost definitely do it again tomorrow.

But this isn't your average user contributed or crowd sourced map. It's not one of the usual suspects; it's not OpenStreetMap, or Google MapMaker or Nokia MapCreator. It's none of these, but it's a map nonetheless and it looks like this.

Looking back at the conference talks I gave and the posts I wrote in 2012, two themes are evident.

The first theme is that while there's some utterly gorgeous digital maps being produced these days, such as Stamen's Watercolor, the vast majority of digital maps can't really be classified as art. Despite the ability to style our own maps with relative ease, such as with Carto and MapBox's TileMill, today's maps tend towards the data rich, factual end of the map spectrum. Compare and contrast a regular digital map, on your phone, on your tablet or on a web site in your laptop's browser with a map such as Hemispheriu[m] ab aequinoctiali linea, ad circulu[m] Poli Arctici and you'll see what I mean (and if you don't browse the Norman. B. Leventhal Map Center's Flickr stream you really should).