The always excellent Motherboard has a fascinating story in talking about the history and use of protest maptivism – the process of turning crowdsourced data into maps.
The All Points Blog has the skinny on the recently announced Google Maps Engine API, and how it allows applications – on any platform – to access enterprise data hosted by Google’s Maps Engine. Clearly, Google are moving against the current enterprise encumbents.
The federal government cloud initiative was announced at CeBIT last week, and the Sydney Morning Herald has pulled together a few different perspectives on it.
Big Think have a great little map that shows an approximation of the super-continent, Pangaea, only with today’s borders remaining intact. It also serves as a wonderful little history on our slow realisation that the continents, indeed, used to be snuggle buddies.
And, with crowd-sourced mapping hot on everyone’s mind since Google’s recent purchase of Waze, Between the Poles notes that the Open Street Map database now contains 34 million kms of roads, and 78 million buildings.
Jonathan Crowe has a great little analysis on the historic origins of maps used in fantasy novels – and how they seem to base them on maps from around the 16th century.
Speaking of ancient maps, Gary’s Bloggage has a great little piece on a particularly ancient map of the world, and how it could bring into question the ol’ Chris Coloumbus’ claim of being ‘first’ in the now USA – if only it were real.
And, while it’s not really spatially related, I found this article on the privacy vs marketing vs phishing quagmire that is Facebook to be really interesting – in a terrifying way.
