The Silliest Maps of the Week

Population dot maps have become very popular over the last few months. Usually these maps are created using data gathered from national censuses.

Tyler Olson however has decided to build his dot map of the world from the ground up. And you can help. All you have to do is visit Yapmap and a dot at your location will automatically be added to the map. The more people who visit the map then the better this dot map of the world will become.

Even with only a few visitors Yapmap is beginning to take shape. I can already make out north America and Western Europe on the map. If you are reading this then please visit Yapmap as I'm really keen to find out what the map will look like once it has had a few thousand visitors.


What the world needs is a FBomb Map - a real-time f#cking map of the world which highlights locations around the globe where people are dropping the f-bomb in their Tweets.

Luckily Martin Gingras has created just such a map. The map includes little animated nuclear explosions that appear on the map each time the f-bomb is dropped somewhere in the world. I left the map running for a little while and I can attest that Americans are the most profane and that the Aussies never swear (or they might all be asleep).


This one isn't silly and also doesn't come from this week. However Snazzy Maps has quickly become one of the Google Maps API websites that I visit most often - so I think it deserves another mention.

Map style wizards are really useful in helping developers create their own map styles but sometimes you just want to be able to browse through examples of styles and pick and choose an appropriate style for your map.

Thankfully we now have Snazzy Maps. Snazzy Maps is a repository of different color schemes for Google Maps. You can browse through the many example map styles on Snazzy Maps by the 'most popular' and 'most recent'. You can also filter the maps shown by a number of useful tags, such as 'dark', 'light', 'two-tone' etc.

Once you find a map style that you like you can click on its title and grab the style array. Snazzy Maps even provides an option to download a simple example of each style.

Map developers can contribute to the repository by adding map styles that they have created themselves. Developers who regularly use the Google Maps API should definitely bookmark Snazzy Maps as a useful resource.