Back in March of this year I wrote about deliberately tracking my journey by using Google's Latitude and unexpectedly tracking the same journey by looking at the history of my Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins.

By using the history function from Google Latitude I was able to put together a quick and dirty visualisation of the locations I'd been to but my check-in history added not only the location but also the place that was at each location.

During last week's Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco, Fred Wilson (no, not the guy from the B-52's) mentioned that you could feed your Foursquare check-in history into Google Maps and produce another quick and dirty visualisation of not only the places you'd checked into but also where those places were.

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!"

Back in December of 2009, I wrote about Paul Clarke trying to solve the problem of where's my train; that there must be a definitive, raw source of real-time (train) information and that

I assert that train operators know where their assets are; it would be irresponsible if they didn't

Whilst the plethora of train operators that fragmented from the ashes of the old British Rail network haven't answered this challenge yet, Transport for London has, opening up just such data as part of the London Datastore API. In today's age of talented web mashup developers, if you release an API people will build things with it if the information is useful and interesting and that's just what Matthew Somerville of MySociety did at the recent Science Hack Day ... a (near) realtime map of the London Underground showing the movement of trains of all of the Tube lines. A screen grab wouldn't do it justice and it takes a while to load, so a video grab might help here.

Last month I wrote that a map says as much about the fears, hopes, dreams and prejudices of its target audience as it does about the relationship of places on the surface of the Earth. With the benefit of hindsight I think I was only half way right.

Sometimes a map becomes more than just a spatial representation and becomes something else.

Sometimes a data visualisation becomes more than just the underlying data and almost takes on a life of its own.

When these two things meet or collide the results can be spectacularly compelling and produce, unintentionally ... art? Look at the image below ... filigree lace work? Crochet for the deranged of mind? Silk for the sociopath? Macrame for the mad? Sadly none of the above.

It's instead an image from the Geotagger's World Atlas but it's still unintentionally beautiful.

Looking back at my career over the last 20 or so years, it's immediately apparent that it's always been a bit geo. Geophysical seismic survey processing for natural resources (OK, mostly for oil and gas) for Digicon ... geo. Setting up operations for ERS-1, the European Space Agency's first remote sensing synthetic aperture radar satellite ... geo and rocket science. Short wave radio frequency planning to enable the BBC World Service to get transmissions into countries who would much prefer the BBC didn't broadcast there ... geo. Deploying the first geo-targeted ad system and rolling out a global place based view of the world internally and to the external developer community for Yahoo! ... totally geo. Granted, there were other roles which had no geo context whatsoever but I always seem to keep coming back to this vague and nebulous mixture of place, location, maps and geography that we term geo.

Some 4 years ago (actually 3 years and 10 months but let's round up for the sake of convenience) I wasn't really looking for a new role, but the opportunity arose to come and lead and engineering team for Yahoo! Now, four years later, it's time to move onto another role, but more of that in a moment.