Outside The Map Room

I’ve always dug geography and considered myself a map nerd. It seems, however, that one of the charter members of the C&B blogroll has proven me wrong. If I were a real map nerd, I guess I would care about the kind of stuff most often posted at The Map Room these days — stuff like the conflation of neogeography with GIS, or the upcoming BBC4 radio series On the Map. I’ll admit that I got a slight kick out of the news that there are now global maps of the Moon and Mars available as apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, albeit a sarcastic one (I just know that the next time I’m on Mars and can’t find an ATM, I’m going to kick myself for not having an iPhone).

I had to scroll fairly far down the front page to find the kind of thing I used to see a lot more of at The Map Room: a link to this delightful set of map art by illustrator Christoph Niemann at his New York Times blog. As a cinephile, I suppose it’s natural that this one is my favorite:

Thus it has come to pass that The Map Room must go without the torrential stream of traffic that surely resulted from its presence on my blogroll. I’m pretty sure he’ll be fine. To be clear, I have nothing at all against The Map Room — I’m just, as they say, not feelin’ it anymore.

As for the remainder of my “Niches” blogroll section, websurfers with or without a cartographic bent should find plenty of interest at the whimsical, wonderful, web-based world of Strange Maps. For example, check out this 1940 map by an Irish satirist endeavoring to make his country look maximally unappealing to possible Nazi invaders.

Or, if you’re both a history geek and a map geek (like me), you can frolic away the hours at the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection site. Rumsey was always awesome, but now it’s even more awesome because a growing portion of the collection can be viewed in a variety of settings, including Google Earth, Google Maps, Second Life, 2D and 3D GIS Browsers (if you’re into that), a nifty ticker interface, as well as the good ol’ Insight Java Client.

The average Rumsey visitor would be well advised to navigate with the site’s Luna Browser, which is newly upgraded, user-friendly and overall one slick piece of work. Among its features are functions to assemble maps and images into “Media Groups,” make slide shows and dynamic presentations from the Media Groups, search Flickr for content to add to a Media Group, create annotations on map images in the collection, and instantly generate links to share map views, annotations, or Media Group content.

You can also embed stuff. Pretty cool, even if their lines of header text do overlap each other. It would look better to embed this on a page where I didn’t have a maximum width of 500 pixels, but you get the idea.

Mappy mappy joy joy!

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