The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps

Michalis Avraam has compiled a list of the essential skills for a successful GIS career, based on a discussion at a GIS Day event in Seattle. Via Slashgeo. Essential Skills for a GIS Career first appeared on The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps on November 20, 2009...

Twitter geotagging is now officially available, though only through the API — which means that third-party applications can do things with it, but it won’t show up in the web interface. It’s off by default; users have to enable it. More information on Twitter’s support page. For de...

Holy shit...

Via Maps-L, LaToya Egwuekwe’s animated map of county-by-county unemployment rates in the U.S. from January 2007 to September 2009. I quibble that there is no slider, but the map is well done. (Am I right in guessing that this was a school assignment?) Previously: WSJ Map of U.S. ...

The New York Times looks at user contributions to online maps, starting with Google, with its Map Maker program covering 140 and its recent opening of its U.S. maps...

Al Franken’s uncanny ability to draw all 48 contiguous states of the U.S. from memory inspired the National Geographic Society to ask other senators to draw their home states from memory, labelling at least three important places on that map. Eleven senators accepted the challenge. ...

The Daily Telegraph reviews The Fourth Part of the World, the new book on the Waldseemüller map by Toby Lester: “Just telling the story of the invention of the name, the creation of the map, its disappearance, and its eventual discovery, would make an interesting book. B...

The Swiss federal data protection commissioner is taking Google to court...

I grew up in Winnipeg, so I was thrilled to discover the thousand-plus maps of Winnipeg, Brandon and the rest of Manitoba posted on the Manitoba Historical Maps Flickr account...

Vanity Fair points to Mapping New York’s Shoreline, 1609-2009, an exhibition at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwartzman building that runs until June 26, 2010 (exhibition details here). ...

The Fail Blog does maps, too. Geography Fail first appeared on The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps on November 14, 2009. Copyright © 2009 Jonathan Crowe. Distributed under a Creative Commons licence.

The Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology in Kansas City, Missouri gets a mention in the travel section of the New York Times (in an article on rare book collections that are accessible to the public) for its collection of celestial atlases. Via MapHist...

Large globes can be kind of pricey; David Burwell built his own 20-inch globe using the Generic Mapping Tools datasets and a beach ball mold. Ingenious. Via Boing Boing and Make. A Homemade Globe first appeared on The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps on November 14, 2009...

GeoVation encourages people to create “great ideas based on geography,” which is to say, map mashups. There are two competitions: one for ideas, more than 100 of which have been posted so far; and one for ventures, which involves prize money. Th...