The Maps of the Week

Kelly Norton has created a beautifully designed interactive map of the most pleasant places to live in the USA. The Pleasant Place to Live Map is a dot heat map of towns and cities in the US displaying the number of 'pleasant' days enjoyed each year.

Norton has defined 'pleasant' as a mean temperature between 55° F and 75° F with no significant precipitation or snow depth, using data from the NOAA. Users can search the map by zip-code or simply click on the map. The 5 most pleasant and least pleasant cities are listed below the map.


Happy Birthday Gio is one of the simplest maps of the week. However it is such a brilliant and cute idea that it is also one of the Maps of the Week.

I'm not sure who Gio is but he has a lot of friends around the world, all of whom were happy to share video birthday greetings with him on this personal Google Map. Happy Birthday Gio uses the Google Maps API Styled Maps feature to create a distinctive, personal map for Gio's special day. The map features videos from Gio's friends from all around the world, which can be watched directly from the map.

A personal birthday map is such a sweet idea. I bet it made Gio's day.


The unwritten rule of online marketing of automobiles is that you have to use Google Maps Street View. Nissan are the latest car manufactures to create a clever internet advertising campaign that uses Google Maps satellite views and Street View.

The Nissan Rogue - Detour allows you to create a route using Google Maps or select from a number of predefined routes. Once you have created a route you can sit back and watch a short animation of your route on Street View with a number of Nissan Rogue inspired twists and turns along your drive.


Time has mapped all the geo-tagged Super Bowl related Twitter messages sent before, during and after Sunday's game. Super Bowl Pulse uses CartoDB with Leaflet map tiles to provide an insight into how talk of the Super Bowl dominated social media on Sunday.

The Tweets are color-coded so that you can see which team generated the most interest. The map is animated so that you can also see how the teams fared on Twitter throughout the game. Half-time related tweets get their own color on the map - which turns the map a nice shade of purple during the main event, squeezed in between the two running around parts.