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).

Most things in life are a journey and the destination of this particular journey was to try and create a custom map style that represented the unique features and challenges of Tandale.

Which meant I needed to download and install TileMill, an interactive map design tool.

Which meant I needed to learn Carto, the CSS-like language for map styling.

Which meant I looked for a template project so I didn't have to start from scratch.

Which meant I found OSM Bright.

Which meant I needed to start small and find a map extract of Tanzania to work with.

Which meant I needed to install and configure PostgreSQL and PostGIS on my Mac.

Which brings me to the starting point of the journey and the reason for this post in the first place.

Nothing on the interwebs is forever. Services start up and either become successful, get acquired or shut down. If they shut down they usually end up in TechCrunch's deadpool. The same applies for APIs and when they finally go offline, they usually end up in the Programmable Web deadpool.

At around 1.30 PM London time yesterday, the Yahoo! Maps API got added to the Programmable Web deadpool for good. Despite the announcement I wrote about last year that it was being shutdown on September 13, 2011, up until yesterday the API was very much alive and well and still serving up map tiles, markers and polylines via JavaScript.

Ah ... art. Art is a contentious area for discussion. One person's work of art is another person's random spots of paint on a canvas. As Rudyard Kipling once put it, "it's clever, but is it art?".

Even artists can't seem to agree on this topic. Compare and contrast Picasso's comment that "everything you can imagine is real" with Warhol's contrarian stance that "an artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have".

Now add maps into the equation and you have a debate where people probably won't always agree. So it was with a conversation on Twitter between myself, Steve Chilton, chair of the Society of Cartographers and psychogeographer Graham Hooper. We were talking about a map like this one ...

This is post number six in the ongoing #mapgasm series of posts on maps found on the interwebs that I like. Yes, it's another map. Yes, it's another Tube map. I make no apologies for this.

A simple map is often a good map. Cutting away cartographical clutter can reveal the heart of what a map is trying to show. But sometimes you can maybe take the map pruning just a little bit too far. Take the map of the London Underground; surely one of the simplest and more effective maps there is. Surely there's not much scope for making it any simpler?

I've said it before, many times, but I'm a 100% un-reconstructed map addict and make no apology for it. I've said this in posts I've written on this blog as well as using it as part of my introduction for talks at conferences. This post is a slightly more long winded version of why I am the map addict that I am.

I grew up in the suburbs of London. For as long as I can remember, every week day morning my father picked up his briefcase and walked to the local British Rail station (for this was way before the privatisation of the British rail network) and went to the fantastical place, to a child's mind at least, called Central London where he worked. He went there on a train. Which was amazing and wonderful to me at the time. I knew he worked in Central London because he had a book of maps of all the streets in Central London. It was old, dog-eared and probably out of date but it made the journey to and from work with him every day and I used to look at it in the evenings, after he'd come home for the day. This mystical and wondrous book was called the London A-Z. It looked something like this.

Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, who was awarded the Turing Prize in 1972 is reported to have once said ...

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

With this in mind, if the process of taking geographical information and making this into a map is called mapping ... what do you call the opposite, the process where you take a map and deconstruct it back to what makes up the map in the first place.

Un-mapping? Anti-mapping? De-atlasing? Whatever you call it, you start out with a map and you end up with an oddly compelling form of art. Which is just what French artist Armelle Caron has been doing.

Start with the map. Let's take a map of Berlin. If you've spent any time in this city, the map will look pretty familiar. It's not the most granular or small scale of maps, but that doesn't matter. What happens next is most definitely art and is akin to magic.