The Maps of the Week

Google Night Walk is an amazing narrated Street View tour of Marseilles at night. Google Night Walk takes you on an immersive journey through the lively Cours Julien neighbourhood of Marseille. During this Street View tour of night-time Marseilles you are treated to an audio narrated guide by Julie and Christophe, two urban storytellers, who help explain the living history of the city.

To navigate the night-time panoramic imagery of Google Night Walk follow the blue line in the Street View, while you listen to Julie and Christophe's narrated guide. You can also deviate from the narrated guide at anytime and explore the city under your own steam by following the dotted paths off of the main tour.

Google Night Walk is a joint project by Google Creative Labs and 72andSunny. The narrator, Julie Muer, is an urban storyteller who walks the streets of Marseilles, collecting the sounds and voices of the city.


Maps can be very powerful tools in data visualization. Especially when you want to show a correlation between two different data-sets. This is true of this map of Forced Labor in Amazonia.

This visualization overlays data relating to the location of rescued slaves and deforestation in the Amazon on a map of Brazil. The correlation between locations where those in forced labor have been rescued and areas suffering from deforestation appears to be very clear on the map.

The map very powerfully reinforces the relationship between the devastation of the rain forest in Brazil and social degradation from forced labor.


Global Pulse has released an impressive interactive presentation exploring how the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals are being discussed on social media.

In the year 2000 the UN agreed to set eight Millennium Development Goals. The eight MDGs were meant to provide a framework from which to halve poverty around the world by 2015. As that deadline approaches Global Pulse and the Millennium Campaign has released Unglobal Pulse, to explore how different countries have been discussing topics related to these goals on Twitter.

This interactive visualization shows the 20 countries which have proportionately tweeted the most about each topic. The visualization includes a neat interactive globe and a Google Map, both of which allow you to explore Twitter messages posted about the MDG goals around the world.