I’ve been playing around with GeoCommons (www.geocommons.com) and have built my first map. It’s the Irish Electoral Boundaries from 2004 (which has since been superseded of course)
You can play with the map here:
http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/25148
Be prepared to wait though, the site seems to be pretty slow. To be fair, the Shapefile I used is over 4MB, which is quite big.
Inspired by the very funny maps of stereotypical views of Europe posted here: http://alphadesigner.com/project-mapping-stereotypes.html
I’ve thrown together an Irish version:
As mentioned in my post below on InfoVis I’m an enthusiastic reader of RSS feeds supplied by a range of sites/blogs. My Google Reader profile is here. In addition to feeds about InfoVis I also read a number of blogs centered around GIS / neogeography / mapping and data.
CreativeCommons Image by HeyPaul on Flickr
Here are a few selected blogs that I find interesting / useful in those fields:
Maps & Mapping:
Ordnance Survey GB Blog It would be nice to see OSi doing some blogging too. There’s a lot going on in OSi and I don’t think this is effectively communicated to the wider public at present.
Cartogrammar Blog Andy Woodruff posts about cartography.
Google’s Lat-Long Blog Official blog from Google’s Geo team.
OpenGeoData Open Data, Open Maps and OpenStreetMap.
The Map Room Jonathan Crowe’s links to and thoughts on maps and map collections, old and new.
Strange Maps Wonderful collection of the strange and interesting in map form.
Suprageography from Oliver O’Brien, who blogs about information visualisation in map form.
ESRI Ireland Primarily of Irish interest, some thoughts from the team at ESRI Ireland
Some Key Thinkers:
Ed Parsons of Google: http://www.edparsons.com/
Gary Gale of Nokia: http://www.vicchi.org/
Spatially Adjusted by James Fee of WeoGeo: http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/
Peter Batty of Ubisense: http://geothought.blogspot.com/
Muki Haklay of UCL: http://povesham.wordpress.com/
Thierry Gregorius of Landmark Information Group: http://georeferenced.wordpress.com/
Geo news aggregators
All Points Blog from Directions Magazine
You can see the full list of RSS sources which I’ve flagged with ‘Geo’ here.
In addition, for Irish viewers there are a number of other sources of information / networking opportunities. These include
Spatial Ireland on LinkedIn and Twitter
IRLOGI which is the representative group for the Irish Geographic Information industry.
IrelandAfterNAMA is an excellent blog about the impact of the current economic crisis in Ireland, from a geographical and economic viewpoint.
Mark Foley of DIT maintains a list of resources which should be of interest to both Irish and International GI professionals
If there are other sites / resources out there which you think I should add to the list above I’d be delighted to hear from you.
These are some sites that I visit regularly / subscribe to with my RSS reader (My shared items from Google Reader: http:)
Shawn Allen (of http://www.stamen.com) is teaching a course on Information Visualisation. The course intro is an excellent overview of the history of the discipline: http://interactiondesign.sva.edu/classes/datavisualization/2010/07/08/introduction/ Also keep an eye on the ‘Updates’ section of the course blog: http://interactiondesign.sva.edu/classes/datavisualization/updates/
Some sources of interesting visualisations / discussion:
Infosthetics – http://infosthetics.com/
Nicholas Feltron (of http://www.feltron.com) has a Tumblr here: http://feltron.tumblr.com/ He’s famous for his Annual Reports: http://feltron.com/ar10_01.html
Flowing Data: http://flowingdata.com/
David McCandless – Information is Beautiful: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ David does a bit of work with the Guardian Data Blog team: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog
Datavisualisation.ch – http://datavisualization.ch/
Strange Maps – http://bigthink.com/blogs/strange-maps
I also put interesting maps I have created on my Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649) and on my site: http://www.geographic.ie
