Neighborhood Ratings

OneDome is a UK real-estate website which has developed a number of online tools which are designed to make it easier to find and buy property. One of these tools is Explore & Score, an interactive map which rates neighbourhoods in a number of different areas.

Enter a UK postcode into Explore & Score and you can find out how the area rates for transport, education, groceries, greenery, safety, quietness and lifestyle. Explore & Score gives each of these individual areas a rating out of 10 and also gives the postcode area an overall score out of 10.

If you select an individual category from the map sidebar you can view related points of interest on the map. For example if you select 'Grocery' you can view the location of all nearby stores, the walking distance to each store and their opening hours. Select 'Transport' and you can view the location and walking times to the nearest stations.


If you are searching for a home in the USA then you might want to refer to Walk Score. You can discover how nice a neighborhood is for walking and cycling at Walk Score. You can also use Walk Score to view a neighborhood's restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores, schools and parks.

Enter an address into the Walk Score interactive map and you can find out how well it scores for walking, cycling and public transit. Walk Score also has a great apartment search facility which helps you find an apartment not only by price but by what nearby amenities are within an easy walk or bike ride.

Trulia Local is another useful interactive map which can help you find out how well a neighborhood rates for other important factors, such as crime, commuting times, local amenities and local traffic. It can also help you find out whether there are good local schools, restaurants, banks and stores nearby. If you want to find how long it will take you to commute from a neighborhood to your work then you can mark your workplace on the Trulia Local  map and view an isochrone map showing all nearby commute times.

Switching Map Provider

Last year Google caught many developers out with a huge increase in the fees charged for using their maps API. Many websites couldn't absorb the costs and switched map providers.

switch2osm is a great help if you want to make the switch to using OpenStreetMap for your interactive maps. However there are still costs involved with using OSM, particularly in serving the map tiles to your map. You can use a third party provider (like Mapbox) or create your own map tile server. Both options will involve costs but may work out a lot cheaper than using the Google Maps API.

When using a third party map provider, like Google or Mapbox, you will always be susceptible to sudden changes in the terms of service or increases in API charges. Switch Maps is a new mapping tool which provides you with a choice of mapping API and makes it very simple to switch between providers. The tool allows you to use either the Google Maps or Mapbox mapping platforms to create your interactive map. If you then want to switch maps between Google or Mapbox it is just a simple matter of changing the URL parameters of your map.

You don't need any coding skills to create an interactive map with Switch Maps. Switch Maps are simple to set up and use. All you need to create a Switch Map is a free Map Channels account.

The Most Common Job in Every State

This interactive map provides some interesting insight into the changes in the American economy and employment over the last four decades. The Most Common Job in Each State uses data from the Census Bureau to show which jobs were the most commonly performed by individuals in each U.S. state for every two year period from 1978 to 2014.

In 1978 the most popular job in many states was secretary. Other popular jobs were farmer, machine operator and factory worker. All four of these jobs feature much less prominently in more recent years. In 2014 the most popular job in more than half U.S. states was truck driver. The rise of automation has put paid to a huge number of machine operator and factory jobs. Automation and the improvements to farming technology has resulted in less people being employed in farming. The rise of personal computing has led to the fall in the number of secretarial jobs.

Automation has yet to take over the role of truck drivers. Truck driving is also a job that can't be farmed out cheaply to China. These are just two reasons why truck driving dominates the map in 2014. However as NPR points out there is another reason. The government records all truck drivers and delivery people under one category. Other jobs are split more finely, for example primary school teachers and secondary school teachers are recorded in separate categories.

The Over-Tourism Map

The Disneyfication Map visualizes the number of tourists visiting the countries of the world, in proportion to the local population. The map is an attempt to show where over-tourism could be having a negative impact on the local population and the visited areas.

The map uses data from the World Bank to show which countries have the most tourists in comparison to each country's population. The redder countries have more tourists and the greener countries have less tourists per capita. If you are more interested in the total number of tourists visiting each country (not the per capita figures) then you can view the data on the World Bank map of International Tourism. This World Bank map colors the countries of the world based on the total number of visiting tourists in one year.

The tourists per capita figure is based on the number of tourists who visited the country over the course of twelve months. Therefore Iceland's 6.52 tourist / resident figure doesn't mean that every out of every 7 people in Iceland 6.52 are tourists. It just means that the 2,225,000 tourists who visited Iceland in 2017 is a significantly higher number than Iceland's population of 338,349. Obviously those 2,225,000 tourists didn't all vacation in Iceland during the same week.

As well as showing in red the countries where over-tourism might be a problem the Disneyfication map also highlights cities which might be suffering from excessive numbers of visiting tourists. If you click on a city with a red dot you can view the estimated number of tourists per resident in the selected city.

A Game of Flags

Esri has released a new map based game for all the vexillologists of the world. The World Country Flags Game is a fun way to test how well you know the flags of the world.

The rules are simple. There are ten country flags displayed above an interactive map. All you have to do is drag each flag onto the correct country on the map. If you place a flag on the correct country that country will now be filled with its map. If you place a flag on the wrong country then you lose one of your ten lives. Every time you get a country flag correct it will be replaced with another country flag.

There are five different levels to play. The easiest is the 'most recognizable' flags level. The other levels include the flags of the richest countries, the flags of the most populated countries, the flags of the largest countries and the flags of the largest economies.

Public Land Sold by Your Council

As a result of the government's austerity programme councils in the UK are being forced into selling off publicly owned land and property. Local amenities such as libraries, community centres and playgrounds have been closed and sold across the country. Around a third of the money that has been raised from this national asset stripping has been spent on redundancy payments.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has worked with the Huffington Post to investigate the 12,000 plus public spaces that have been sold off by councils since 2014/15. You can find out what public spaces have been sold by your local council on the Bureau's map Sold From Under You. If you enter your council's name or your postcode into the Bureau's interactive tool you can view a map of the public spaces sold off by your local council. The map sidebar also lists the spaces sold, the amount of money each was sold for and the total amount of money raised by the council from selling off local public spaces.

You can read more about the investigation in the Bureau's report Revealed: The thousands of public spaces lost to the council funding crisis. You can also read more about the investigation in the Huffington Post's story Has Your Local Council Been Selling Off Public Spaces.

The Wine Regions of the World

Do you know your Bordeaux from your Burgundy? Do you know which grape varieties are grown in which wine regions? Whether you can answer these questions or not, if you care about wine, you should have a look at the Biarritz Wine Academy Map. The Biarritz Wine Academy Map is an interactive map of the wine regions of the world.

The Biarritz Wine Academy Map is very much a work in progress. At the moment if you click on a wine region on the map the only information provided in the map window is the region's name. In the future knowledge cards will be added to each region so that when you select an area on the map you can learn more about the type of wine which is produced there. The developers also plan to add a search option which will allow you to search regions by name.

The Biarritz Wine Academy is also working hard on adding new regions to the map. At the moment they are concentrating on adding U.S. and Georgian wine regions. In the near future wine regions in Croatia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova will be added to the map.

Weinlagen is another interactive map which shows you the wine regions of the world. Weinlagen actually does have a little bit of information on many of the regions shown on the map. Select a region on the map and you can often view a list of the types of wine grown in the chosen area. If you zoom-in on the Weilagen map you can also view the locations of individual vineyards within each region.


If you are a fan of American wine then you might want to refer to the Every Vine interactive map. The Every Vine Map is attempting to map America's vineyards and wineries. It has made a good start with this map of U.S. wine regions, vineyards, shiners and wineries.

If you want a meal with you glass of wine might I recommend the TasteAtlas. The TasteAtlas is an interactive map which allows you to explore the local foods, dishes, tastes and cuisine of any location in the world. Using the map you can search different locations to discover the kinds of things the locals like to eat and drink. It is a great way to discover the tastes of different regions of the world and, at the same time, get a little inspiration about what to have for dinner tonight.

The Inequality Atlas

The Atlas of Inequality is a new interactive map which shows the income inequality of customers who visit stores and establishments in the Boston metro area. The map shows the place inequality score of each establishment. This score shows how unequal the store's customer's incomes are.

The atlas reveals some interesting patterns as to which type of establishment are most equal and which are most unequal in Boston. It also reveals which neighborhoods in the city have the least economically segregated establishments and which neighborhood's establishments are most economically segregated.

Working out the socioeconomic background of visitors to each establishment takes a lot of work analyzing customer mobile phone location data. The Atlas of Inequality uses anonymous location data from mobile phones to determine the number of people who visit establishments. It then explores the socioeconomic background of these visitors to give each store and establishment a place inequality score.

The stores and coffee shop location data used in the Atlas of Inequality comes from the Foursquare API. The anonymous visitor data comes from Cuebiq. Using Cuebiq's location data the Atlas of Inequality sees where visitors spend more than 5 minutes and if the location equates to a Four Square listed location. If you select a place's marker on  the map you can view the number of people from each socioeconomic group who frequent the location.

The socioeconomic background of visitors is determined by seeing which census block they most commonly spend time in between 8:00 pm and 4:00 am. This is assumed to be a person's home address. MIT then use the median household income of the census block group, as determined by the 5-year American Community Survey for 2012-2016, to decide the person's socioeconomic background.

How Many Miles do You Scroll Online?

Have you ever wondered how many miles your fingers scroll when you browse the internet? Digital Detox did so s/he created a Google Chrome extension to track their personal scrolling distance on all the websites they visit. The data is then sent in real-time to a Leaflet map.

Marco Land is an interactive map which shows the path of the Camino Francés, the most popular pilgrimage route of the Way of St. James. This ancient pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain is 955.22 kilometers long. So far Digital Detox has scrolled less than 4 kilometers or about 0.35% of the route.

I think it might be quicker to actually walk the pilgrimage for real.

Shopping on Street View

Retailers Fred Perry and Raf Simons have released a virtual reality shopping experience. Fred Perry x Raf Simons is a custom Street View scene which you can navigate around just like you can move around in Street View on Google Maps. However, unlike Google Maps, on these virtual panoramas you can click on the people and buy their clothes.

All the models that appear in Fred Perry x Raf Simons are interactive. Click on a model and you can browse the clothes that they are wearing and even click through to buy an item on the Fred Perry online store. As on Google Maps all the models have their faces blurred. Some of the items of clothing are also blurred. This means that the item is not yet available to be purchased on the online store.



Google has put a lot of effort into creating virtual Street View tours of museums around the world. On Google Arts & Culture you can take a virtual stroll around many of the world's most famous museums. These tours include paintings and other exhibits which can be clicked to view details about the exhibits.

Lots of stores can also be navigated on Google Maps Street View. Many of these have been created by Google's 'trusted photographers'. I don't think any of the stores with Street View are fully interactive yet. Product ranges update all the time so it might be too much effort to create interactive products on Google Maps Street View. However large stores could easily have interactive store department signs on Street View which when clicked on open the relevant page on the store's website.