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!

Maybe only map nerds like me get excited about the rollout of this kind of feature. Frankly, I’m not even sure what utility it has for a normal Google Maps user. The nearest thing I can think of at the moment is perhaps for increased specificity in giving directions, as in, “It’s the fifth house on the right.” Or something like this…

“Hey guys, when I was looking for a place a little while ago, there was a really nice room at this lovingly restored craftsman house on McCadden…”

That’s a true story, by the way. Blew your mind, didn’t it? …Yeah, you’re right — not really.

OK, then how about a little vocabulary: googling around to find out if anyone else was taking note of Google Maps’ audacious deployment of property lines, I found a few web forums of other cartographic geeks that were. On one of them, the pedant-in-residence (every web forum has one) imparted that maps showing property lines are properly called cadastral maps.

Cadastral. Did you already know that one? Yeah, me neither. So you’re welcome, dear readers. Surely you’ll have no shortage of opportunities to sprinkle that one into conversation. Go forth and impress the hell out of the sophisticates on the cocktail party circuit, and remember your web-based wingman the next time you’re online.

Far be it from me to make light of auto accidents (a subject with which I have become all to familiar); nevertheless, I could not help but be struck (ha ha) by the following item, which I discovered at The Map Room:

Cars Crash Into the University of Georgia Map Library

The University of Georgia’s Map Library seems to be a favourite target of wayward (and inebriated) drivers: it was hit last September (there are photos) and, less spectacularly, earlier this month. Via MAPS-L [a cartographic listserv] where the University’s map librarian reported on “what has apparently become an annual event.”

Since the librarians are writing poetry about it, I guess nobody was killed or anything. Then again, in my schoolboy days I did encounter a few librarians who were utterly cruel and heartless, so who knows.