The Maps of the Week

My favorite map this week was the Windyty Wind Forecast map. Windyty uses NOAA wind data to create a global animated wind map.

Watching the animated wind patterns on Windity can be pretty hypnotic, especially if you open up Noise Machine's Wind Noise Generator in another browser tab.  If you need to relax and unwind this Sunday then you could do worse than sit and back and watch the Windty map while listening to the Wind Noise Generator.


If you've ever wondered how Mario and Luigi manage to navigate so effortlessly around the Mushroom Kingdom and Dinosaur Land then you need to check out this Super Mario map from Duncan Graham. This interactive map re-imagines the world as an 8-bit map in the style of Nintendo's classic game, complete with golden coins and mushrooms.

Accompanying the map is a great 'how-to' guide on how the map was created with Mapbox Studio. It's worth reading the article if you want to learn about importing land or water source files into Mapbox Studio, how to add custom elements to your map and how to order layers.


This year there has been a number of really great mapped visualizations of New York taxi data. This latest map visualizes taxi traffic from JFK and LGA airports during the 2013 holiday season (Nov 15th to December 31st).

The NYC Taxi Holiday Visualization animates taxi journeys from New York's airports over the course of a month and half. As the animation plays you can view the animated tracks of thousands of individual cab journeys taken from JFK and LGA airports to all parts of the city.


The Solar Eclipse Finder is an Esri map that displays the path of past and future solar eclipses for any location on Earth.

The tool couldn't be simpler to use. Just click on the map and past solar eclipses at the selected location are shown on the map in green and future eclipse are shown in blue. If you mouse-over the path of a solar eclipse you can view details in the map side-bar.

The details on each eclipse include the date, time and the duration of the solar eclipse. The Solar Eclipse Finder includes the paths of 905 solar eclipses from 1601 to 2200.

Improving the Public Tranport Map

Public Transport Not Traffic (PTNT) is a community campaign to improve Melbourne's public transport network by asking the public to map their suggestions about how the city's public transit system can be made better.

To add a suggestion anyone can click on the PTNT CrowdSpot map of Melbourne. Once you click on the map you can suggest the improvements that you would like to see at the selected location. You can also use the map to browse the suggestions left by other users.

However you can also view the results of all the suggestions received so far on the PTNT CrowdSpot Visualisation map. This map visualizes all the mapped improvements suggested to the campaign so far. The suggestions are color-coded to show whether they are related to the train, tram or bus networks. The suggestion markers are also sized to indicate the level of support for each suggested improvement.

We're Not in Vegas Any More

On many Saturday mornings I awake dazed and confused. When I lift my head from my drool covered pillow I cannot help but wonder where the hell I am and how the hell did I get here. Eventually, hurting and hungover, I''ll get up and I'll stagger to the window, look out upon the unfamiliar surroundings and exclaim,

'Shit! Is this Vegas?'



I'm sure your Saturday mornings are mostly the same. That's why you should get Am I in Las Vegas? Now when you wake up hung-over and confused all you need to do is share your location with this map and you'll immediately get an answer as to whether you drunkenly flew to Las Vegas the night before.

Am I in Las Vegas actually has a serious purpose. When Las Vegas was first incorporated in the mid-1900's, property owners were able to opt-out. Therefore Las Vegas' boundaries are very complicated. You can actually find yourself in a neighborhood which is surrounded by Las Vegas but because your building chose to opt-out of incorporation you are not in the city.

This can clearly cause confusion when citizens request services from the City. Therefore Am I in Las Vegas? has been created as a simple tool for residents of Las Vegas (and those who are in doubt) to be able to quickly check if their address fall within the remit of the Las Vegas City Council.

Mapping Fraccidents

Earth Justice has released a map showing the location of accidents related to the rise of fracking in the USA. Fracking Accidents Across the United States uses the Google Maps API to plot accidents such as poisoned drinking water, polluted air, mysterious animal deaths, industrial disasters and explosions, which have been connected to oil and gas drilling.

The map includes two overlays which show areas where fracking is active and areas of potential fracking. The accidents themselves are shown on the map by skull and crossbones map markers. The data source for each incident is included in the detailed report of each fracking accident.


StateImpact Pennsylvania has released a series of mapped visualizations of Natural Gas Drilling in Pennsylvania.

The maps show which operators are drilling in Pennsylvania and where. They also show which wells have been cited for violating state environmental regulations. So far there have been over 3,800 violations resulting in fines of $5.9 million. The drills are displayed on the map with color-coded markers to show the wells with no violations and those with one or more violations.

You can select individual wells on the map to view details about the operator and any violations.


Faces of Fracking is an investigation into how the impacts of fracking are being felt in California.

This story map visualization, built using d3.js, plots the locations of the 532 oil & gas wells in the LA Basin. As you scroll through the investigation the map also plots the number of pounds of toxic chemicals released at each fracking site.

Continue scrolling and the map zooms out to show the 3,014 wells across California, where high–intensity production is either planned or already taking place, and the 1,105 wells where waste is being injected into the ground. You can also view the proximity of each of these wells to California's groundwater aquifers.


The Texas Tribune has published a map showing the location of disposal wells where waste-water, often from hydraulic fracturing sites, is being disposed of in the state. Texas Disposal Wells visualizes the location of 7,000 disposal wells in Texas.

The map uses hexagonal binning to highlight the number of wells within an area. You can zoom in on the map to view the location of the individual wells.

The Texas Tribune uses the Mapbox platform. Mapbox has written a nice tutorial on how to use hexagonal binning with Mapbox created maps. Binning: an Alternative to Pointmaps explains how the free and open source QuantumGIS tool can be used to create a hexagon density layer, which you can then overlay on top of a Mapbox map.


Colorado experiences, on average, one oil spill a day. In total that is 4,900 spills in the last thirteen years. The result of all those oil spills was the release of nearly 102 million gallons of oil, drilling fluids and other toxic materials into the environment.

The Western Toxic Release Map shows the location of 13,600 spills in Colorado and New Mexico between 2000 and 2013. You can click on any of the spills displayed on the map to view the date of the spill and the number of gallons spilled. You can also click-through to view the full Oil Conservation Division report on the spill.

You can filter the results shown on the map by year or view the total 14 years of oil spills in one go.

Old School Sim City

Who isn't a fan of Will Wright's classic SimCity game?

Would be town planners around the world have had hours of fun building cities in SimCity. Over the years the game has become more and more realistic but has also maybe become a little too complicated for some. Well old school gamers can now recreate the simple fun of the original game in two new online versions of the original classic game.

Micropolis.JS is a port of the original SimCity game created with JavaScript. The game includes all the features of the original game and requires you to build residential, commercial and industrial zones. To ensure that your city continues to grow you will need to plan carefully to ensure you have enough power stations. You will also need to keep your town's citizens happy by keeping crime and pollution to a reasonable level.


3D City is another port of the original game. The game-play is exactly the same as SimCity classic, however 3D City uses WebGL to turn your created town into a proper 3D world. Therefore as your town grows you can pan around and rotate the world and zoom in and out to get a closer look at the buildings sprouting up in your burgeoning metropolis.

Unfortunately 3D City doesn't seem to have a save option, so each time you play you have to start your city from scratch. You will also obviously need a WebGL enabled browser to play 3D City.

The Tapped Submarine Cables Map

This week German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on how telecommunications companies have been helping the UK's Government Communications Headquarters’ (GCHQ) to tap submarine cables.

The report, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, revealed some details about submarine cables currently tapped by GCHQ. Submarine Cable Taps is an interactive map which shows which undersea cables have been tapped by GCHQ and which cables are not mentioned in the leaked GCHQ documents.

The 'read me' section of the map's GitHub page warns that you shouldn't entirely trust the data. There are some cables mentioned in the documents which have not been identified and there may be some errors in the map.

The Animated Wind Forecast Map

Earth.nullschool.net's gorgeous animated globe, visualizing weather conditions around the world, has become the inspiration for many maps. For example Esri took the same weather data from the Global Forecast System used in the earth.nullschool.net map and created Windy-JS.


Windy-JS re-purposes the weather data so that it can be overlaid in a canvas element on top of a variety of mapping APIs. Esri has even created a demo map with Windy-JS, Wind Animation, which allows you to view global wind conditions animated on a slippy map.


Now Windyty has taken the same approach to create an animated wind forecast map based on NOAA wind data. The Windyty Wind Forecast map is very similar to the Windy-JS map. Like Windy-JS the Windyty map beautifully animates wind patterns on top of a global map.

However Windyty also allows you to view forecast wind patterns for the next five day. The map includes a number of other weather layers (including cloud cover and temperature) and allows you to view animated wind patterns at a number of different altitudes.

Mapping Your Thanksgiving Dinner

This Thanksgiving America will consume around 250 million turkeys, millions of barrels of cranberries and hundreds of thousands of acres worth of green beans. Smithsonian has created this map to show you where your Thanksgiving dinner comes from.

Where Did Your Thanksgiving Dinner Come From? shows the location of the U.S.'s turkey farms and also where sweet potatoes, cranberries and green beans are grown. You can click on either of the four food groups on the Thanksgiving plate to view their production areas on the map. You can then select any of the dots on the map to view details about the farms in each selected county.

Where the Rich Live

The Daily Telegraph has released a map showing the average weekly salary across the UK. The Where the Highest Earners Live map uses new data from the Office for National Statistics.

You can click on the map or enter an address to find out the average weekly salary for any area in the UK (excluding Northern Ireland). The UK's highest earners all live London, in Wandsworth, Westminster, and Richmond upon Thames. The lowest weekly earners live in West Somerset.

The Telegraph has also released a map, using the same ONS data, which shows where the richest people live in each local authority area. The Richest Places in England and Wales allows you to see where the highest earners are concentrated in each area.

Not that The Telegraph is obsessed with wealth or anything but the map does not show where the poorest live in each local authority. In fact The Telegraph claim that the "map gives an indication of the places most likely to be hit hard by a proposed mansion tax". This is of course completely erroneous and a blatant attempt by the newspaper to try and paint a misleading picture of how many people would be affected by the proposed policy.

For example in London the map shows a large percentage of Waltham Forest in red. This would lead you to expect that the proposed mansion tax would affect a large number of people living in this local authority. In fact the proposed tax would affect no-one in the borough. This is of course true of most of the red areas shaded on the map.

Diamond Geezer has created a heat map of the number of people who would be affected by the mansion tax in London. Using data from the last census he found that in London that less than 3% will be affected by the tax. When you take into account that the highest earners live in London you can assume that this figure is much lower outside of London.

Mapping Black Friday Hashtags

Black Friday 2014 by Social Bakers is a series of maps visualizing the social sharing taking place around Black Friday on Twitter and Instagram.

The visualization includes maps of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin and Miami showing the location of Twitter and Instagram posts which include Black Friday related hashtags. Social Bakers began gathering data for the maps on the 22nd November and will continue until the 30th November.

The map sidebar includes running totals of the number of times particular brands have been mentioned. You can also view recent photos posted to Instagram using the same Black Friday related hashtags by selecting the 'Photos' tab in the sidebar.

The Race Gap in U.S. Police Departments

In Ferguson, Mo, 67% of the population is black. However only 11% of the Ferguson police department is black. According to a 2007 survey the situation is little better in most police departments around the country, where on average minorities only make up around 25% of police forces. In The Race Gap in America's Police Departments the New York Times has mapped the racial composition of local police departments in 16 metropolitan areas, including St, Louis.

In each of the 16 maps the local police departments are represented on the map by circular map markers. The size of each circle on the map is scaled to represent the size of each police department. The color of each circular marker is shaded to reflect the racial composition of each department. The lighter colors indicate that the racial composition of the department is closer to the racial mix of the area it serves. The darker shaded markers indicate that the composition of the police department is markedly different to the general population.

You can also mouse-over each police department on the map to view the racial composition of local residents and of the local police department.

How to Make a Rent Map

Last year the Financial Times created a nice interactive map visualizing the cost of renting in London. The London Renting Crisis map allows Londoners to view a heat map of where they can afford to rent in the capital based on their annual salary.

The map includes a slide control which allows you to adjust the annual salary level. As you adjust the salary the map automatically updates to show where you can and can't afford to rent a room in a London flat.


The Berliner Morgenpost has now released the source code of a similar map for Berlin. Titel der Anwendung recreates the rent map of London but for Berlin, using the Leaflet mapping platform.

The Berlin map uses random data as it is just a demo of an interactive heat map using Leaflet and TopoJSON. The source code for the map is available on GitHub on an MIT license. You can therefore use the Berliner Morgenpost's map library to create your own adjustable heat map for anywhere in the world, using your own TopoJSON for the shaded polygon areas.

The Solar Eclipse Map

The Solar Eclipse Finder is an Esri map that displays the path of past and future solar eclipses for any location on Earth.

The tool couldn't be simpler to use. Just click on the map and past solar eclipses at the selected location are shown on the map in green and future eclipse are shown in blue. If you mouse-over the path of a solar eclipse you can view details in the map side-bar.

The details on each eclipse include the date, time and the duration of the solar eclipse. The Solar Eclipse Finder includes the paths of 905 solar eclipses from 1601 to 2200.

The Rand McNally Trip Planner

Rand McNally Trip Maker is a new interactive road trip planning tool. Using the map you can get turn-by-turn driving directions for your trip with the option to find interesting places to visit along the route.

To create a road trip with Trip Maker you just need to enter a starting location and your destination. You can add extra stops to your trip simply by selecting the 'Add Stop' button. Your new stop will then be added to your to a trip automatically, in the location that best minimizes your total driving distance.

You can adjust the route of your trip simply by dragging the route line around on the map. If you want to add a waypoint to a route you can therefore just drag and drop the line on your desired location and the the route will automatically update.

If you want to make some pit-stops along your route you can use the 'Search on My Way' option. This allows you to search for rest-stops and points of interest along your route. You can even define how far you are prepared to deviate from your route for interesting places to visit by entering the number of miles.

When you are happy with your planned road trip you can email and export your trips to any Rand McNally GPS device.

The Google Maps Virtual Post Office

The French national mail service, La Poste, is using Google Maps and Street View in its latest online marketing campaign. La Poste - Ca Envoie is a fun little postal delivery simulator which allows you to virtually post a number of silly objects to any address.

Using Ca Envoie you can virtually drop a Sumo wrestler, a mermaid, a unicorn, a lumberjack, or some goose pâté onto any address in the world which has Street View imagery. Just enter an address and pick one of the five objects and you can watch a short animation of your object falling onto your address using Google Maps satellite imagery.


Your chosen object will then be shown landing at your selected address using the Street View imagery from that location. If you are vegetarian you might want to skip the pâté animation. This little movie features a goose crashing into your street before being transformed into the goose pâté.

If you sign into Ca Envoie with your Facebook account you can post your created Google Maps postal animation to your Facebook wall.

Super Mario World

If you've ever wondered how Mario and Luigi manage to navigate so effortlessly around the Mushroom Kingdom and Dinosaur Land then you need to check out this Super Mario map from Duncan Graham. This interactive map reimagines the world as an 8-bit map in the style of Nintendo's classic game, complete with golden coins and mushrooms.

Accompanying the map is a great 'how-to' guide on how the map was created with Mapbox Studio. It's worth reading the article if you want to learn about importing land or water source files into Mapbox Studio, how to add custom elements to your map and how to order layers.


If vintage computer games don't float your boat then you might prefer this Dot Map by Saman Bemel Benrud.

You've probably seen dot maps before which visualize data on a map using differently sized or differently colored dots. This map takes that concept to the next stage by representing the underlying map features data as dots.

The result might not be much use as a map. But as a beautifully abstract interactive dot painting it works just fine.

The Rapid Beating Heart of LA

LA Metro Movement is an animated map of LA's Metro Rapid buses. The map shows the routes of LA's Rapid bus lines with the recorded locations of the city's buses being animated as they transport passengers across the city.

I don't know anything about the creation of this map so I'm guessing that the map is using the location data from one or two hours out of a single day. If you follow a single animated dot on the map it doesn't seem to travel very far in each step of the animation. So unless it takes 24 hours to cross LA by bus this map is providing a snapshot in time of the city's bus network in action.

It's still a great mapped visualization of transit data and a great demo of CartoDB's Torque library in action.

Mapping New York Taxi Data

This year there has been a number of really great mapped visualizations of New York taxi data. This latest map visualizes taxi traffic from JFK and LGA airports during the 2013 holiday season (Nov 15th to December 31st).

The NYC Taxi Holiday Visualization animates taxi journeys from New York's airports over the course of a month and half. As the animation plays you can view the animated tracks of thousands of individual cab journeys taken from JFK and LGA airports to all parts of the city.

While the animation plays out on the map the side-panel keeps a running total of the number of taxi trips taken from each of the airports' terminals. A bar graph at the bottom of the map also reveals the number of taxi journeys taken on each day. The graph reveals the drop in flights during Thanksgiving and a distinct rise in traffic after the holiday weekend as people fly back into NYC, presumably after visiting family outside of the city.


NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life is a MapBox visualization of the journey of one New York taxi over the course of 24 hours.

The map animates one New York taxi's route over the course of one day. As the animation plays the taxi's position is shown by a yellow circle map marker. All the passenger journeys are added to the map with a blue polyline. While the animation plays the map also keeps a running total of the cab's total number of passengers, fares and tips received.

Once you have viewed a day in the life of this New York taxi you can choose from another one of thirty cab journeys mapped over 24 hours.


Hubcab is a mapped visualization of 170 million taxi trips over one year in New York City. Using the map it is possible to view all pickup and drop-off points in the city and to view the number of trips taken between two separate locations.

Locations that were used as taxi pickup points in the city are shown as yellow dots on the map and drop-off points are shown as blue dots. It is also possible to refine the results displayed on the map by time of day.

You can view the number of taxi journeys between two different locations  by dropping two markers on the map. After you place the markers on the map you can see the number of taxi journeys taken in one year in both directions between the two locations. You can even refine the results by time of day to explore when the most journeys between the two points are made at different times of the day.

Wikipedia Heat Maps

Frankenplace is a 'thematic map search engine.' Which means that you can use the map to create instant heat-maps for a range of words based on the words' frequency in over 1.6 million articles on Wikipedia and online travel blog entries.

For example the heat map above is the result of typing 'mosque' into Frankenplace. If you enter 'mountain' instead then you will get a heat map that roughly resembles the location of mountain ranges around the world.

Frankenplace can therefore be used to get an understanding of the spatial dynamics of a topic by providing a heat map of the topic as featured in Wikipedia and travel blogs. The site can also be used as a search engine to find relevant documents that march your search query.

For example, in my search for 'mosques' I might only be interested in French mosques. I can therefore use the map to zoom in on France. If I then mouse-over Paris on the map the side-panel shows me a link to the Grand Mosque of Évry. I can even read the Wikipedia for the Grand Mosque of Évry directly from the map.

Maps of the Week

My favorite map this week was this fun game from Esri. GeoJigsaw is an inspired interactive map jigsaw puzzle. The game allows you to select jumbled up maps from around the world. All you have to do is to put all the jigsaw pieces back together to complete the map.

You can select jigsaw map puzzles to play by location or by difficulty level. If you can't find a map that you like don't worry. You can just zoom in on any location in the world and create your own jigsaw map puzzle.


This week Google released a really nice story map exploring Jane Goodall's research on chimps in Gombe Park, Tanzania. The map takes great advantage of Google's recent Street View imagery captured in the national park.

The Gombe Park Street View Trek follows a now familiar format for story maps. To progress through the interactive you just keep scrolling down the page. As you scroll through the Trek you can view highlights from Google's Street View imagery in the park and learn more about Goodall's groundbreaking research.


This Google Maps based 2014 Toronto Municipal Election map is a really nicely designed visualization of the recent Toronto elections. The map allows you to explore how each electoral ward voted and also provides information on a range of socio-economic data about each ward and subdivision.

If you mouse-over a ward subdivision on the map you can view a breakdown of the percentage of votes cast for each candidate. The voting breakdown also includes the percentage of votes cast for each candidate in the whole election ward and in the whole city. This means you can easily compare the voting record of each sub-division with the whole ward and with the overall results,

When you mouse-over a sub-division on the map you can also view data, beneath the map, on the education, income and occupation of voters in the selected ward.

The Bumps of New York City

Many years ago I briefly worked as a road surveyor. The job involved walking five to ten miles of road a day, painstakingly measuring every road irregularity (e.g. potholes) and recording the data on a handheld computer. The data was then used by the local authority to identify the most damaged roads and schedule road repairs.

This was in the days before the availability of commercial GPS units so everything had to be measured by hand and measuring wheel. These days I imagine the job could be done at one hundred times the speed with cars fitted with a GPS unit and an accelerometer. Or you could even do it by bike.

Varun Adibhatla has created an interesting visualization of this kind of road surface survey carried out using a bicycle and an iPhone's accelerometer. Bumpiness in NYC shows the trail of a bike journey in New York. The bike's track on the map is colored by 'bumpiness', with the most bumpy sections colored in red.


Many laptops these days also have built-in accelerometers. The Quake-Catcher Network realized that they could create the world’s largest and densest earthquake monitoring system simply by using the data from accelerometers in the world's laptop computers.

The Quake-Catcher Network links participating laptops into a single coordinated network that can detect and analyze earthquakes faster and better than ever before. QCN uses Google Maps to show the data collected from participating laptops and from participating desktop computers with USB sensors. The map also shows the latest USGS reported earthquakes.

United States Arrest Rates

To illustrate a report on the Racial Gap in U.S. Arrest Rates USA Today has created an interactive map which compares the arrest rates of black and white Americans across the USA.

You can use the Compare Arrest Rates map to discover the arrest rates of white and black Americans by police departments throughout the United States. The markers on the map are colored blue where there is a larger disparity in the rate of black arrests and green where there is a larger disparity in the rate of white arrests.

The data for the map comes from 2011 and 2012 FBI arrest records.

Crap on a Map

Apparently people defecating on the streets is a thing in San Francisco. At least it is a big enough problem for Jennifer Wong to think it warrants its own interactive map.

Jennifer has used San Francisco Department of Public Works data of sidewalk cleanings for 'human waste or urine' to create the (Human) Wasteland map. The map includes a steaming pile of heat-map view of human waste in San Francisco, which just might help you avoid wading through human excrement on your next trip around town.

The map makes use of the Google Maps Styled Maps feature to provide a context appropriate colored base map. The same 'appropriate' colors are used in the heat map layer. If you want you can filter the crap on the map by month and search the map by address.

The Great German Bakers Map

German newspaper Zeit has decided to celebrate the tasty delights of the best German bakeries with this German Bakers Map.

To help create the map Zeit asked its readers to recommend their favorite local bakeries. They then used the Mapbox mapping platform to map all the bakeries in Germany which received more than one recommendation from Zeit's readers. The bakeries are shown on the map with different colored markers. The darker the color of a bakery's marker then the more recommendations it received.

Users of the map can enter a post-code to view their closest recommended bakeries. They can also click on a baker's marker on the map to see what Zeit's readers recommend you should buy and eat at the chosen bakery.

Squatting in East & West Berlin

West Berlin has a long tradition of civil, grassroots political action. One of the clearest demonstrations of this tradition is the well established squatter movement in the city. After the Fall: Socio-Spatial Movements in East Berlin plots the location and significant dates of civil action in both East and West Berlin.

Significant instances of civil action are plotted on the map using two colors. The yellow markers show 'socio-spatial movements' from before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the blue markers those which occurred after the fall. The red line on the map shows the position of the Berlin Wall.

The map demonstrates how before the collapse of the Berlin Wall this movement of civil action was largely confined to West Berlin. However since the reunification of Germany the eastern half of the city has also seen a rise in civil action, particularly in the growing squatting movement.


The data for the After the Fall map comes from Berlin Besetzt. Berlin Besetzt is a map showing the locations of squats in Berlin from 1970 to the present day. You can view all the houses that have been squatted in this period or you can use the date slide control to view the history of squatting in Berlin over the last few decades.

Using the date control it appears that 1981 was the golden age for squatters in Berlin. This map also clearly shows the rise of squatting in east Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The map also reveals that Kreuzberg has remained a very popular area for Berlin squatters for more that thirty years.

How Walmart Conquered America

A new CartoDB map visualizes how Walmart discovered America. Walmart Nation plots the historical opening of every Walmart store and reveals how the company contributed to the first map of the new United Stores of America.

Walmart's perilous journey started in 1962 in Rogers, AK. Their primary objective was to explore and map newly acquired territory, find a practical route across the Western half of the continent, and establish an American presence in this new territory before Britain and other European powers tried to claim it.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of these retail pioneers every American can now sleep soundly at night in the secure knowledge that there will be low prices, always, when they awake.

Mapping Support for Obamacare

iSideWith is a website that can tell you which political party you should support. iSideWith asks you a series of questions on domestic, international and environmental issues and then shows you whether you side most with the Democrats or Republicans (or other parties) on these issues.

iSideWith also use the data collected from these questions to provide a breakdown on support for a number of major issues. Part of the breakdown for each issue is a Google Map showing support or opposition for the issue across the United States.

For example this Google Map shows nationwide Support for Obamacare based on users' answers on iSideWith. Overall the poll shows 45% supporting Obamacare and 52% in opposition. The map allows you to see where support and opposition is most strong, at state, county and city level.

You can also view the poll results and maps for a number of other social and political issues, including gay marriage, abortion and government spending.

The Google Maps Guide to MotoGP

MotoGP is the premier championship of motorcycle road racing. Hertz, this year's sponsors of MotoGP, has released a Google Maps based guide to some of the tracks on the 2014 MotoGP tour.

Beyond MotoGP is obviously meant to highlight Hertz' role in sponsoring MotoGP and to help market the Hertz brand. To be successful in these goals however the map needs to attract users and to do that it must provide some kind of useful service to its visitors.

Ostensibly then the map is a guide to five of the top race tracks on the MotorGP tour and to their surrounding areas. In this role the map is reasonably successful. If you select a marker on the map you can not only learn about a track's history but also discover useful information about how to visit the selected circuit location.

The map also provides useful information about the tourist attractions around each of the featured MotorGP tracks. Beyond MotoGP therefore provides a great service for any MotorGP fans who are planning a vacation around attending a MotoGP event at any of the five mapped tracks.

However MotoGP is an 18-race competition. So you would have thought to be a truly effective guide for MotoGP fans then the map should cover more than the five selected tracks. As a marketing tool it would surely be more effective if it provided a comprehensive guide to all the tracks on the MotoGP world championship tour.

The Interactive Map Jigsaw

If you've been furiously clicking away trying to beat your hi-score on MapQuiz then it could be time to take a break and try out a more sedate and relaxed geo-game.

GeoJigsaw is an inspired interactive map jigsaw from Esri. The game allows you to select jumbled up maps from around the world. All you have to do is to put all the jigsaw pieces back together to complete the map.

You can select map jigsaw puzzles to play by location or by difficulty level. If you can't find a map that you like don't worry. You can just zoom in on any location in the world and create your own map jigsaw puzzle.

World Champion Geographer

I am the geographic champion of the world.

Okay, I'm not. That title is currently held by Frederick B. But I am the fifth highest scorer today on the Esri MapQuiz. Which is good enough for me.

MapQuiz is a your geographic literacy game which tests how well you can recognize satellite imagery from different locations around the world. Log-in to MapQuiz with a Facebook account and you will be shown a series of satellite images. All you have to do is guess the correct location from four suggestions.

You are awarded points for each location that you get correct and for how quickly you can answer. After you have completed six rounds of the game you can compare your score against today's top scores, the top scores recorded this month, the best this year and the all time top scores.

I'm warning you though you will have to go some to beat me!

Map Lenses

Esri has released a Maps Lens library which allows developers to add 'draggable map insets' to their maps.

Esri suggest the tool could be used for before and after maps, for example instead of the now fairly common swiping method to horizontally transition between two different maps of the same location. You can view an example of swiping between two maps on this visualization of Europe in 1914 and 2014.

Esri's new Maps Lens library instead allows you to add smaller draggable map insets on top of a base map layer. You can view a demo of the library in action on this Lens map and the source code for the demo is available here.


Some good examples of using a map lens to compare before and after maps are available in the Smithsonian & Esri History Maps collection/

The Smithsonian & ESRI History Maps are a series of maps combining historical maps from the David Rumsey collection with Esri's modern aerial imagery. Each of the maps includes a neat magnifying glass tool that allows you to view the modern day aerial image through the historical map. You can even switch the views around and compare the historical map on top of the modern aerial imagery.

The series includes historical maps of a number of US cities, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC, LA and Denver.