The map of the London Underground is world famous for its linear representation of train stations and lines. It was created by Harry Beck in the 1930s and subsequently became the standard by which other metro and subway maps were designed. The map uses a simple set of rules to great advantage, such as coloured lines, stations equally spaced, lines can only go horizontally, vertically or diagonally, curves always have the same radius and so on. Here’s a small section of the map showing some of these features (the whole map is copyright Transport for London).

However, we’re now so used this particular version, that it’s easy to forget that it represents a physical geography. With a mashup of Google Maps and station co-ordinates, Jonathan Stott has put together a representation of the London Underground, showing where the underground lines are in the real world. The image below is just a screenshot – if you go over to his website, you can play with the map.

It’s interesting to see where the underground lines actually go but it’s also worth reflecting that this is exactly what Harry Beck was trying to get away from 80 years ago.

Bing has release an app that documents the massive damage from the May 22nd Joplin, Missouri tornado.  The new app is a part of Bing Maps, which has become a really nice competitor for Google Maps.  According the Bing team the photos come from “Surdex, one of our Global Ortho flying partners, captured these images 36 hours after the event at an amazing 7.5 cm resolution (which means each pixel represents an area about the size of a standard post-it note). Surdex is making these images freely available to government agencies as a public service (see their website for details).”

The app shows both before and after photos that document the sad damage of the massive EF-5 storm.  Users can flip back and forth between both the before and after shots to see the changes.

To access it, you can visit the Joplin Tornado app page.

MarineTraffic.com is a live map showing the location of shipping of 299 GT (gross tonnage) or over. Sounds boring but in fact it’s a totally awesome mashup of data. You can zoom into your local coast and see what’s pottering about or you can follow a ship in the news and see what’s happening to it.

Here’s what’s going on in the English Channel:

Here are the ships waiting to go through the Panama Canal.

You can also follow ships that are in the news. Here’s the MSC Opera which lost power in the Baltic and the tug Svitzer Trym in attendance. If you click on a ship you can get further details, including the speed and pictures of the vessel.

Finally, here’s one of the UK’s latest warships undergoing trials. HMS Dragon is a Type 45 destroyer.

There are additional clients for iPhone and Android users. And if you want to get notifications of what your favourite boats are doing, you can sign up for alerts and notifications.

Great resource if you want to see what’s going on, especially if you have a sea view and you want to know what’s floating past.

I love maps.  You look at an Ordnance Survey Landranger map and you see a thousand years of history, of exploration, of society, of geography all in single sheet of paper that you can fold up and put in your pocket.  GPS gives you directions but a map gives you a world.

Consequently, I was fascinated and delighted to see these typographic maps from Axis Maps.  Currently only available for Boston and Chicago, every feature that you’d expect to see has been created using just type.  So for roads and highways, you have a ribbon of text made from the street’s name.   The names of neighbourhoods fill in the blocks as subtle shading.  Trains and subways are picked out in the name of the line.

It’s taken the team at Axis Maps over two years to create the city maps – the idea started with a University of Wisconsin party invite – and the whole process is covered on their blog, along with lots more images.  They started with OpenStreetMap images and then carefully added text over the feature areas.  There was also great deal of copy’n'paste but the end result is worth it.

If you do go over to their website, click on some of the thumbnails – you’ll get a pop-up that expands and zooms the detail.

The maps are available to purchase – $30 gets you a 2ft-ish x 3ft-ish print.  UK dwellers can purchase from zazzle.co.uk – just search for Axis Maps.  I’ll be ordering Chicago shortly.

All images copyright of Axis Maps LLC.

Hubby, the kids and I are going to be running away for a week in the middle of July.  We’re leaving hot and steamy St. Louis and headed north to Wisconsin to visit friends and family, and spend a day or two in the Dells.  A good old-fashioned American Road Trip.  We love our road trips, and in fact usually travel as a family no other way.  I head down to the local Thrifty Car Rental and pick up a sizable beast of a car, pack a basket of road snacks, load up all the iPods and MP3 players with music and audio books, and away we go.  This trip will be about a seven hour drive, which is tolerable and entertaining, especially when we get to drive by things like this. (For a full run-down on the interesting things we found at the antique mall in Illinois in March, you can check out my personal blog post for our last trip.

In preparation for our trip, I was over on Mapquest looking at driving directions.  We are trying to decide if we want to make a detour near Bloomington, Illinois, or not.  And lo and behold, Mapquest has a new beta out, and making detours or multiple legs of a trip to get more specific directions is a brand spanky new (and useful!) feature on the new Mapquest.  I know I’m a bit of a holdout for using Mapquest to begin with, but I’m kind of a creature of habit, and I like how Mapquest did things, including how they responded to feedback I’ve given over the years about driving routes.  I’ve used Google Maps on occasion, but I still often end up back on Mapquest.

And I have to say, the new Mapquest, still in beta for the moment, is pretty darned nifty!  The logo has changed, which in my mind was probably unnecessary, but beyond that, there are some great functional changes that I like a whole lot.  You are immediately faced with a map on the right, and a text box on your left where you can put in the location you want to find in one single line, ala Google Maps.  Once you enter the location data and hit enter, a new map immediately pops up.  The text box now has a link below it for directions, giving you another text box to put in your other location, and within a second, you have a new map, and full driving directions.  At that point you can “add more stops,” getting a complete set of directions that will take you to multiple places, rather than just a beginning and an end, and needing to start all over again for a second destination if you want to add one.

This is going to be great for our road trip.  I can now map from Missouri to Bloomington, to Baraboo, WI, to the Dells, to House on the Rocks, and back to Missouri, without having to re-enter data and print separate directions and maps.  It also gives us a great overall idea of what our trip will entail, driving wise, something I had to sort of guess at with my terrible math skills before.

Now I’m really in a vacation state of mind, with two more weeks of work to go before we can blow this pop stand and I can test Mapquest’s new mapping features!

Show really flew tonight covered a great deal of ground in a hurry. Think you will like the fast paced format

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Ask.com Privacy
Ricoh GPS Camera
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Show Notes:
Spacewalk Junk Toss
Mozilla Whoops
Label says Please Pirate
SunRocket Fall out
Japanese SpaceCraft Mistake
VC Money
SlideShare Update
Virtual or Desktop
Pageflakes
Webmaster Controls
Maps – Maps – Maps
Scoble and RSS
Wireless USB
FritzBox
OS X Worm and Death Threats?
New Zune
XM – Sirius Price Reduction
iPhone Hacked via Safari
Microsoft Web Analytics
ISP Cox redirecting PC’s
FCC Needs to Listen
Netflix Lowers Subscription
$5.00 to enter Apple Store
Why men die before Women
Google Fear Hits AT&T
Scratch Programing for Kids
Online Media Tools
Drew Carey
Opportunity Survives