2011-07-13
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Cellphone Calls Reveal The United States’s Invisible Ties at Co.Design, via new-aesthetic (although it’s been all over for a while), originally from Sensable City’s Connected States project.
One noteworthy part, for me anyway, is that Alabama and Georgia are grouped together, despite the fact that they span a timezone boundary.
2011-05-24
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Dead Yet Alive - the top five historical figures mentioned on BBC TV. (From Ladies and Gentleman, this is the BBC at technogoggles, wherein subtitles are grist for data mining.)
2011-03-24
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John Batelle, arguing Why Color Matters: Augmented Reality And Nuanced Social Graphs May Finally Come of Age.
I know that for the hip young kids, Flickr might as well not exist, but it’s had Places pages for a while. They let you get recent photos from, say, New York.
Now, there’s probably a lot more that could be done with these (I can think of two little changes off the top of my head). But compared to Color - who reportedly spent $500,000 on domain names, only to serve a single page - Flickr’s already got hundreds of millions of geotagged photos, and the infrastructure to search and display them. If I wanted to build something looking at the history of places over time, I know which service I’d look at.
2011-02-23
Baidu Maps and the Edges of the World
Baidu’s cute isometric 3d city renderings are doing the rounds again, but they’re not the only thing interesting about the Chinese website’s maps.
When you first go to the home page, the map defaults to China. This isn’t that odd: so does Google China’s Maps, and most of the Google country domains do the same thing. What is odd is that barely anything outside China is shown.
A portion of the screen for the default view of Baidu Maps.
Unlike Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ovi, you can’t drag the map past the international date line. Instead, there’s a hard edge.
If you do scroll westwards, the lack of detail becomes clear. I assume the labels are for continents, not countries. What’s certainly true is that when you zoom in merely one step from the default, the coastlines (and labels) vanish, turning the entire map grey.
I wonder whether this reflects some sort of official thinking (“the rest of the world might as well not exist”), or a more prosaic technical difficulty (perhaps problems in sourcing data). Still, I thought that both the hard edges and lack of detail were worth noting.
2011-01-20
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2011-01-12
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John Bull in How Do You Solve A Problem Like Southeastern? at London Reconnections (via iamdanw).
The post explains why the train operator had so many problems both with snow, and with getting their updated timetable to their customers. It’s well worth reading.
2011-01-07
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I’m not sure why the Freeing Its Data, London Turns Access Into Apps article in Time should be a photo essay, but it is. Still, some of the photos are nice, like this one. (via Dan W.)
Photograph; Dan Kitwood / Getty Images.
2010-10-19
post/1352227388
The Map Room: Darker Than You Think
the original Light Pollution Atlas was systematically biased by the fact that snow was on the ground when the underlying satellite measurements were taken. Lorenz recalculated the light pollution for the U.S. and southern Canada based on snow-free satellite observations, and the whole northern part of the area came out roughly one full zone darker. That means that the original atlas overestimate the skyglow in this area by a factor of three.
Even so, the Bay Area sticks out as a red spot. At least there are some good dark skies within a (relatively) easy drive. (via aemkai’s ffffound)
2010-08-24
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Scott Rosenberg: Why trust Facebook with the future’s past? (via Phil Gyford).
He goes on to compare the way that older sites - like Flickr - expose an archive, whereas newer ones - like Facebook - don’t, despite the fact that some of the promotional commentary for the Places feature has been about looking back in twenty years. In other words: “Facebook could be such a repository today, if it actually cared about history. It has given no evidence of such concern.”
