Five Years of Fatal Traffic Accidents

Mapbox has made an interactive map which allows you to explore where fatal traffic accidents have occurred over the last five years. The map also includes a route planning tool that will show you where fatal traffic accidents have happened along your route.

Commuter Crashes uses data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to show the locations of fatal traffic accidents. You can filter the results shown on the map by year and by contributing factors, such as alcohol and excessive speed. You can also filter the results to show fatal traffic accidents that involved pedestrians or cyclists.

To view fatal accidents along a route you can just click on the map to enter your starting point and destination. Alternatively you can type in the place-names for your route.

Regional Variations in the German Language

Speigel has created a fascinating visualization of regional variations in how people speak German. More than 670,000 people throughout Germany were asked which words they used for 24 common terms. The regional differences in their answers were then plotted on an interactive map.

To create the Alltagssprache map Germans were asked what words they used for various terms, such as pancakes, meatballs and chatting. The interactive map plots where Germans used different words for these common terms. The different colors on the map show were the various different words were used. The opacity of each color shows how common a particular word was used at that location,

You can use the forward and back buttons at the top of the interactive map to browse through the visualizations of each of the 24 tested in the language survey.

Sheep View - Part Two

Earlier this year some eager mappers started a petition appealing to Google to add Street View imagery in the Faroe Islands. Instead of waiting for Google to respond to the petition, some of the islanders also decided to start collecting their own 360 degree panoramic imagery.

The Faroe Islands may not have Google Street View but it does have a lot of sheep. The logical step therefore was to deck out the islands' sheep with 360 degree panoramic cameras. So the Faroe Islands invented Google Sheep View.

Google has not yet responded to the Faroe Islands petition. Which means that Mapillary, the crowdsourced  street photo mapping project, has had to step in to fill in the gaps in Sheep View.


This summer Mapillary employee Peter Neubauer and his son traveled to the Faroe Islands, put on their sheep costumes, and began capturing street photos of the Faroe Islands (some of this might not be true).

You can read more about how they captured the new street level photos of the Faroe Islands on the Mapillary blog post, Photo Mapping the Faroe Islands. You can also explore the imagery yourself on the Mapillary map or on Peter's photo story of A Father-Son Mapping Trip.

The Safer Streets of San Francisco

San Francisco is the latest city to adopt a Vision Zero strategy. Vision Zero initiatives look at the causes of traffic accidents and where they most happen. They then implement policies to try to make those streets safer for pedestrians, cyclists and other road users.

On Maps Mania we've looked before at Vision Zero Boston and Vision Zero New York. In both these initiatives interactive maps were used to identify the roads with the worst safety records. They were also used to help inform the public about (and track the progress of) the initiatives adopted by both cites to make these roads safer.

Interactive maps also play a large part in Vision Zero San Francisco. The Vision Zero San Francisco Maps & Data page includes a number of maps. These include maps of the roads & intersections that have been identified as having the worst safety records, a map plotting 2016 road fatalities and maps showing pedestrian & cyclist collisions on the city's roads.

It also includes the Vision Zero Capital Improvement Projects map. This map shows the locations of the initiated projects designed to improve safety on the city's roads. It also allows you to track the progress being made on these projects.

Citizen Mapping for the Environment

A new crowd-sourced tool plans to monitor deforestation and other environmental damage caused to the planet around the world. Map for Environment uses OpenStreetMap mapping tools with satellite imagery of known logging, industrial agriculture, dam, and fracking locations to help map how these industries are effecting the environment.

Most importantly - You Can Help! If you log-in to Map for Environment with an OpenStreetMap account you can begin to help map logging roads, the spread of industrial agriculture, dams and fracking sites.

Each of these four industrial activities have their own separate citizen mapping project. For example, if you log-in to the Logging Roads project, you can begin mapping to help monitor the spread of logging roads in the Congo Basin. You will be shown a series of historical satellite imagery of the same location. Logging roads are identified on the satellite imagery. All you need to do is identify the date when the logging road first appears on the satellite imagery.

You can observe the huge spread of logging roads in the Congo Basin on an animated Logging Roads map. This map uses historical satellite imagery to show the spread of logging roads in the Congo Basin over recent years. By contributing to the Logging Roads project you will help to make this map more accurate.

Annual Weather Patterns

Climatemaps visualizes the weather over the course of a year around the whole world. The map animates average global monthly climate data from 1961-1990 to show you when every location in the world has its hottest, driest or wettest weather.

You can select from a range of weather layers from the drop-down menu (including precipitation, cloud cover and average temperatures). You can then view the weather data animated on the map through a whole year (you might need to let the animation play through a couple of times before the layers load completely).

The map was made with the OpenLayers 3 map library with a little help from Tippecanoe to create the map tiles. Tippecanoe is a tool for building vector map tilesets containing large amounts of location data. It is a very efficient way to visualize very large data-sets on an interactive map with minimal impact on performance.

You can view a few over maps built with the help of Tippecanoe here.

Facebook Remembers Everything

One of the central themes of the Jason Bourne films is the idea that the CIA are pretty good at tracking everybody's movements (unless you are Jason Bourne). Of course most of us make it very easy for the CIA by sharing our every waking moment with the world anyway - on social media.

To prove this point the internet campaign for the new Jason Bourne film uses data from your Facebook and Instagram accounts to prove how much of your life you reveal on social media. Log-in to Remember Everything with your Facebook and Instagram accounts and you can view your life replayed on Google Street View.

Or - at least I think that's what it does. When I log-in to 'Remember Everything' I just get a message saying 'We don't have enough data on you'. Ha! I win Zuckerberg .

According to the press release you will be shown moments from your life - in the form of "a multiple choice question (example: "Which of these four people were you with on April 15th, 2015?"). All memories are further contextualized with Google Street View panoramas of the location from that specific memory."

Have fun playing with Remember Everything. Then, when you are done playing, have a look at your Facebook privacy settings and think about disabling your location history.

Where's Lolly?

Monday mornings were made for map games. There's no better way to start the working week than by escaping for a few minutes to the other side of the world. So let's play Where's Lolly?

This guess the location game from UK holiday website icelolly.com requires you to identify ten different place around the world. To help you in your quest you get to view a fly-over of each location through an airplane window. You are also given a few written clues to each location.

When you think you've guessed the correct location you give your answer by placing an ice lolly (or popsicle) on a Google Map. You are then awarded points based on how close you get to the real location.

Maps of the Week - Maps in Motion

The Nature Conservancy has created a mesmerizing animated map showing where birds, mammals and amphibians will need to migrate to in order to maintain hospitable climates as global warming takes effect.

Migrations in Motion uses data from climate change projections to model potential habitats for 2,954 different species. The animated map visualizes the migratory flow of these species, showing how they would need to move from their current habitats to the projected locations.

This amazing animated flow map layer is based on the equally amazing Earth Wind Map and Chris Helm's adaptation of the Earth Wind Map code. You can learn more about the science behind the Migrations in Motion map on this Nature Conservancy blog post.


The London Underground is the beating heart of London. It is also its venous system, carrying its people, its lifeblood, around the city.

Tube Heartbeat is a map of traffic on the London Underground. It is an animated flow map which shows how traffic at individual stations rises and falls over the course of a single day. As the animation plays the map of the London Underground beats like a living heart as the people of London travel to & from work, and across the city.

Running totals above the map show the total number of arrivals, departures, interchanges and the total number of journeys throughout the day. You can also select individual stations on the map to view a chart of these same totals for an individual Underground station over the course of an average weekday.


GPlates is a 3d animation which shows how the Earth has evolved over millions of years. The map shows the Earth's shifting plate tectonics from 240 million years ago up until the present day.

As the animation plays you can watch how the post-Pangaea Earth formed, as that super-continent drifted apart. The current land mass is shown beneath the shifting tectonic plates. You can therefore observe how the positions of the continents and countries we know today have moved around over the centuries due to the rifts in plate tectonics.

GPlates includes an option to view the same animation on top of a 2d map. It also includes controls which allow you to adjust the speed of the animation playback.

Mapping Land and Sea Reclamation

Over the last 30 years the Earth has gained 173,000 km² of land. Most of it from land reclamation projects. However this isn't just a one way process. Over the same time period the Earth gained 115,000 km2 of water. Much of this presumably due to coastal erosion.

The Deltares Aqua Monitor is a fascinating new global map which allows you to visualize land and water surface changes since the year 2000. The map was created by analyzing changes in Landsat satellite imagery. Custom algorithms were created to scan the satellite imagery to detect changes in surface water and discover where water has become land and land has become water.

On the interactive map green overlays show where surface water has been turned into land and blue overlays show where land has been changed into surface water. If you turn on the advanced options on the map you can toggle the changes on and off. You can also view the changes yourself directly on the map by switching between the 2000 and 2015 satellite imagery.

Some of the most dramatic surface water changes can be seen in:

• the extending lakes in the Tibetan plateau
• coastal land reclamation along the Chinese coast 
• the drying up of the Aral Sea
• the meandering rivers in the biggest deltas

Boston's Changing Map

Mapbox has created an interesting visualization of how Boston's geographical footprint has changed through history. Coastlines of Boston provides two different historical views of Boston, as it looked in 1788 and 1898, and allows you to compare these views to the map of Boston today.

The map is actually a neat demonstration of what can be created using Mapbox Studio's new dataset editor. The dataset editor allows you to add and edit geospatial data within Mapbox's existing browser based style editor.

The dataset editor allows you to add data to your maps by uploading CSV or GeoJSON files. It also allows you to add or edit data directly on your maps using point, line, and polygon editing tools. Once you have uploaded and edited your data you can then save the data to your map tilesets.

The Coastlines of Boston map was created by importing historical maps of Boston into Mapbox Studio and then drawing around the historical coastlines. Once the coastlines were traced they were then saved as a map tileset. You can read more about how Coastlines of Boston map was created on the Mapbox blog.

Segregating America's Schools

A great movement to re-segregate schools is underway. Across the United States wealthy communities are gerrymandering school districts to ensure that their children will not have to mix with the children of poorer families.

The Supreme Court case of Milliken v. Bradley in 1974 ruled that desegregation could not be ordered across school district lines. At the same time as rich neighborhoods are being allowed to create their own school districts, state funding of education is being slashed across the United States.

This ensures that schools are, like never before, reliant on local tax funding. In this way the richest neighborhoods ensure that they have the most well-funded and the best schools and at the same time the students of poorer neighborhoods will not be admitted to these schools.

Edbuild has created an interactive map which explores examples of the re-segregation of schools across the United States. The map visualizes the 50 most segregated borders between school districts in the country. It also allows you to view the most segregated borders in each state.

The Edbuild Fault Lines map also examines more closely education in five individual cities. These examples look at how rich neighborhoods are able to segregate their schools, ensure that they don't have to accept students from poorer neighborhoods and that they receive the best funding.


NPR has also looked closely at how school funding in the USA ensures that the rich get the best schools. They created an interactive map which visualizes how much each school district in the USA spends on school funding. Why America's Schools Have A Money Problem colors each school district based on the level of school spending in the district per student.

The map shows that local funding is usually dependent on the levels of local property taxes. If a district has a number of successful businesses contributing a lot of money through property taxes then the school district is more likely to have higher levels of school spending per student. In essence schools in affluent areas are likely to be much better funded that schools in less-affluent areas.


A nice complement to this map is the Memphis Teacher Residency's EdGap map. The EdGap map visualizes school SAT and ACT scores on top of the median household income in the school neighborhood.

The main take home point from this map seems to be that just about anywhere you look in the USA the school's with the worst SAT and ACT scores are mostly in the poorest neighborhoods and the school's with the best results are usually in the richest neighborhoods.

London's Heartbeat

The London Underground is the beating heart of London. It is also its venous system, carrying its people, its lifeblood, around the city.

Tube Heartbeat is a map of traffic on the London Underground. It is an animated flow map which shows how traffic at individual stations rises and falls over the course of a single day. As the animation plays the map of the London Underground beats like a living heart as the people of London travel to and from work and across the city.

Running totals above the map show the total number of arrivals, departures, interchanges and total number of journeys throughout the day. You can also select individual stations on the map to view a chart of these same totals for the individual Underground station over the course of an average weekday.

OpenStreetView

OpenStreetView is a new application and map for collecting and presenting geo-referenced Street View imagery. OpenStreetView is a Telenav project but the software is open-sourced and the imagery is free to use under a Creative Commons license.

Using the iOS or Android app you can collect Street View imagery and automatically upload it to the OpenStreetView map. You can view all the uploaded Street View imagery on the OpenStreetView desktop map.

One of the main purposes behind OpenStreetView is to improve OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetView includes computer vision technology which can recognize speed signs in uploaded imagery. OpenStreetView is also working on computer vision technology to automatically detect street lanes and lane restrictions. This data can then be fed back into OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetView is obviously very similar to Mapillary, the current leaders in crowd-sourced Street View imagery. OpenStreetView claim that the major distinctions between the two projects is that OpenStreetView is truly open-sourced, 100% focused on improving OpenStreetMap and optimized for car drivers. They also say that OpenStreetView users own their own data. This means users can download their own uploaded imagery and have the option to delete their account and remove their imagery from OpenStreetView at any time.

The Global Trade in Crude Oil

Crude oil is the world's single most actively-traded commodity. A World of Oil allows you to explore the world's leading exporters and importers of oil over the last 20 years.

A World of Oil uses a WebGL interactive globe to visualize the top ten importers and exporters of crude oil for each year from 1995 to 2014. You can also select individual countries on the map to view where the county imports oil from or where it exports oil to. You can even view the total amount of money made or spent on oil.

The 'Stories in Oil' section (accessed from the hamburger menu) picks out some interesting stories in the data. For example, 'US Spend Falls' will take you to a view showing USA oil imports in 2012. Although still the largest importer of oil in 2012 the USA actually spent less on importing oil than in 2011.

Mapping the Texas Triangle

Texas Triangle Tragedies maps the number of fatal accidents in Texas from 2005 to 2014. The map picks out what it calls the 'Texas Triangle', an area outlined by I-35, I-45 and I-10, which has a high concentration of traffic accidents.

I like the consistent design on the interactive map in this report. The aesthetic of highway signs is used for the timeline, legend and for the information windows. The map itself however isn't particularly revealing. As the introduction to the map points out this area has a densely concentrated population. So with more people, and presumably more traffic, we might expect this area to have a higher concentration of accidents than elsewhere in the state.

Texas Triangle Tragedies draws attention to the fact that the "number of traffic fatalities has remained relatively flat comparing the years 2005 and 2014". The site's analysis of the notable contributing factors to the traffic accidents is probably more revealing than the map itself. It shows that driving under the influence is a leading contributor to accidents and that "alcohol-related traffic fatalities increased by more than 20 percent during the time period".

If the Texas Triangle Tragedies map included an option to allow you to filter the accidents shown by contributing causes it could possibly reveal some interesting spatial patterns about where these different types of accidents occur.

Discover the New Delft

Nieuw Delft is a huge new urban development taking place in the Dutch city of Delft. The development will include 800 new homes, new businesses, restaurants and parks. You can now explore how this new development will look when finished on a beautifully designed interactive map.

Ontdek Nieuw Delft is a really cleverly designed oblique aerial view map of the Nieuw Delft district. The map allows you to explore what is currently little more than a huge construction site on a large oblique view of Delft. If you want to see the future of Nieuw Delft then just turn on the seamless image overlays to reveal an oblique projected view of the finished development.

Markers on the map allow you to find out more about individual buildings and districts in the Nieuw Delft. You can also switch to a more traditional map view if you want a better idea about how the Nieuw Delft area fits into the existing map of the city.

Revealing Your Location with Photos

Many people knowingly share their location with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pokemon Go and countless other apps. However there are probably just as many people who are unaware that they are sharing their location on-line, either because they have forgotten that they agreed to it, or they were unaware what they agreed to when they blindly ticked to accept an app's terms and conditions.

There are probably even more people who are unaware that they are sharing their location every time they share or post a photo online. Accidental Geography is a good reminder that the metadata you share when you post a photograph online can include the location of where that photo was taken.

Accidental Geography maps photos that have been posted to Wordpress blogs by users who haven't removed the geo-tagged data added by their digital cameras and /or phones.


A slightly more polished and humorous warning of accidentally revealing your location by sharing photos online is I Know Where Your Cat Lives.

I Know Where Your Cat Lives displays pictures of cats on a Google Map. The pictures of the cats come from popular photo sharing websites and the locations are based on the data hidden in the cat photo metadata.

Brutalist Street View

Google's panoramic Street View imagery is a great resource for documenting and reporting on building styles around the world. For example, Arti-Fact has been collating and collecting architecturally interesting buildings and sculptures that can be found on Google Maps Street View for over four years.

Artstreetecture is a similar collection of architecturally interesting Street View images. However Artstreetacture has a narrower focus than Arti-Fact, concentrating purely on the Modernist and Brutalist architecture of the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Brutalism obviously has its fair share of critics. Many people find Brutalist buildings cold and ugly. However there does seem to be some re-evaluation of Brutalism going on in architectural criticism. For example, in Britain there have been campaigns to save and conserve examples of Brutalist architecture.

Thanks to the work of Artstreetecture and Google Maps Street View you can view Brutalist buildings from around the world and make up your own mind about whether these buildings deserve saving or whether they deserve the wrecking-ball.

The World of Movie Maps

If you've ever wondered where your favorite films were shot or which locations in your neighborhood have featured in the movies then you should check out these interactive maps dedicated to mapping the filming locations of blockbuster movies.

MovieTrip features a worldwide Google Map plotting the locations featured in thousands of films. Just zoom in on a location and the markers on the map will reveal the locations where movies have been shot. If you then select the marker on the map you can click through to view stills from the movie showing its various shooting locations and another map featuring all of the locations featured in your selected film.


If you've ever wanted to visit the stunning locations featured in a Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings then you should have a look at Expedia's interactive map of the best locations seen in film and television.

Expedia's World on Screen map features the shooting locations of some of your favorite films and television shows. Select a movie location on the map and you will be taken to a more detailed map featuring some of the shooting locations used in the selected film.

For example, if you click on the Cardiff marker in Wales, you can view a map of the city highlighting some of the locations which have featured in the famous BBC drama Doctor Who.


If you've wanted to purchase a product that you have seen in a movie then you can use TheTake to help identify and purchase your coveted item. If you aren't interested in movie related products you can still use TheTake to identify the filming locations used in your favorite movies.

An interesting feature of TheTake's movie map is that you can filter the results by category. For example you can select 'Restaurants' to only view restaurants and bars which have been used as the settings in movies. Therefore, if you want to surprise your significant other, you could use TheTake to find a restaurant featured in their favorite movie and treat them to a special movie themed night out.


Filmed in San Francisco maps all the locations in San Francisco used in movies since January 2013. The map is based on all the film permits issued by the San Francisco Film Office between January 2013 and August 2015.

You can search the map by location simply by clicking on the markers on the map. Alternatively you can use the list in the map sidebar to find a film by name and then view all the San Francisco film locations used in that film on the map. Each film includes a brief note on the scene location. You can even click through to view the original filming permission issued by the San Francisco Film Office.


In the three years from 2011 to the end of 2013 there were 17,241 film scenes shot on New York's city streets. There were so many that it is probably harder to find a Manhattan street that didn't feature in at least one movie than a street that did.

This Filmed in NYC Leaflet map allows you to explore which films were shot on which New York streets. You can click on the colored streets on the map to discover which films were shot on the selected street. Alternatively you can select a film from the map sidebar to discover which city streets were involved in the shooting of the film.

New York's city streets are colored on the map by the number of films that were shot there. You can therefore also use the map to discover which New York city areas are the most popular with film directors. Times Square and the Financial District both jump out on the map as being popular locations for shooting movies.

Singapore's Stagnant Housing Market

Singapore's relatively weak economy, extensive new builds and tighter rules on immigration has led to a cooling of the Singapore property market. The Strait Times has analysed the data behind Singapore's stagnant housing market, looking at where real estate is not selling and why.

Tracking Down Singapore's Unsold Private Homes includes an interactive map visualizing real estate projects in the city which will be completed in 2016 & 2017. The map uses scaled circular markers to show the location of new builds and the number of unsold units in each project. If you select a marker on the map you can learn more about the project, such as the name of the developer, the number of unsold units and the price range distribution of the units that have sold.

The article also includes a chorpleth map showing the drop in rental take ups in each Singapore region over the last three years.

The Mesmerizing Migration Map

The Nature Conservancy has created a mesmerizing animated map showing where birds, mammals and amphibians will need to migrate to in order to maintain hospitable climates as global warming takes effect.

Migrations in Motion uses data from climate change projections to model potential habitats for 2,954 different species. The animated map visualizes the migratory flow of these species, showing how they would need to move from their current habitats to the projected locations.

The amazing animated flow map layer is based on the equally amazing Earth Wind Map and Chris Helm's adaptation of the Earth Wind Map code. You can learn more about the science behind the Migrations in Motion map on this Nature Conservancy blog post.

The Olympics in Your Backyard

If you have been inspired by the Rio Olympics then why not run some Olympic races around your own neighborhood? You don't even need to measure out the correct distances as the New York Times has worked it all out for you.

Olympic Races, In Your Neighborhood allows you to see what Olympic races would like if they were held in the streets around your house. Just enter your address into the NYT's Google Map and you can view a series of different Olympic events measured out on the roads near your house. The map will even tell you the time you will need to run each race in order to beat the gold medal winner in the Rio Olympics.

Design Patterns for Maps

If you ever want to know the best way to visualize your spatial data then you might want to have a look at UX Patterns for Maps. UX Patterns for Maps provides brief descriptions of a number of visualization techniques which you can use for mapping data.

The site is a great introduction to various design patterns that you can use for visualizing data on maps. So, if you ever need to know when you should use a choropleth, heat map, dasymetric, isochrone or dot map, then UX Patterns for Maps can help you decide. It provides a brief overview of a large number of different mapping techniques. It even provides links to examples of each design pattern being used in an interactive map.

The design patterns can be filtered by visualization 'problems'. These are sorted into: 'compare', 'filter', 'highlight', 'relate' or 'spatialize'. The patterns can also be sorted by tags, such as 'storytelling' and 'juxtaposition'.

Austin's Magical Music Map

The Austin Music Map is a great crowd-sourced interactive map of Austin's music scene. The map allows you to explore and listen to music from all around Austin. It also allows you to upload your own musical moments that you have experienced in the city.

Apart from the great music that is embedded on the map, what impresses me most about the Austin Music Map is the use of circular information windows and the map's magical interaction events. If you hover over any of the markers on the map an opaque circular info window appears. Click on the marker and the map itself becomes a circular page element which shrinks to reveal the selected artist or playlist in a full-screen window behind the map.

Find Your Nearest Dinosaur

Forget Pokemon. Buzzfeed has created a dinosaur location map.

What Dinosaur? is a simple Google Map which can show you the nearest dinosaur to your current location. Just click on the interactive map to share your location and What Dinosaur? will show you your nearest dinosaur and how far away it is. It also provides you with a brief description of the dinosaur and where its fossil remains were discovered.

At the time of writing What Dinosaur? doesn't show you the nearest dinosaur gyms. Therefore it isn't possible to train your dinosaurs or create epic dinosaur battles. What Dinosaur? also only works in the UK.

Map Colors Don't Run

One of the biggest trends in interactive mapping in 2016 is mapped visualizations of sports data. If you are thinking about creating your own sports data map then you might also want to think about styling your map tiles to match the colors of your favorite sports team. Luckily Teams Basemaps has done all the work for you.

Team Basemaps provides team base maps in the colors of all the teams in the English Premier League, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, National Basketball Association, National Football League and National Hockey League. Just select your favorite team and you can download an Esri base map which matches your team's colors.

Unfortunately Team Base Maps does seem to occasionally use the wrong colors for some of the featured teams. I don't know about the US sports teams but the English Premier League base maps do seem to have quite a few errors. Just in London the red & white of Arsenal, the claret & blue of West Ham, the blue & white of Chelsea and the white & blue of Tottenham all seem to have been replaced with some random colors. Although it looks like Team Base maps has got the colors of Crystal Palace correct. 

To be fair to Team Basemaps the team colors are taken from teamcolors.github.io. So the color errors aren't strictly the fault of Team Basemaps.

The World Wide Map of the Internet

The New Cloud Atlas is a map of the global information infrastructure which transmits data around the world. The map shows the locations of the physical hardware (such as submarine cables, telecoms towers, masts and antennae) that power the World Wide Web. Using the map you can also view the locations of warehouse data centres, internet exchanges, cables and street cabinets

The data for both the map and the information infrastructure comes from OpenStreetMap. This means that the New Cloud Atlas relies on crowd-sourced data contributed by OpenStreetMap users. It also means that you contribute information to help make the map more accurate and complete.

You can learn more about the New Cloud Atlas and how it was created on this thinkwhere blog post. The post includes links to the project's GitHub page.

Global Map of OSM Activity

OSM Activity is a global heat map of OpenStreetMap edits made around the world. The map shows the number of changes made to OpenStreetMap in each map tile area dating back to 2008.

If you zoom in on the map you can click on a map tile to view a graph displaying the number of changes made to OpenStreetMap in that area. The graph itself is also interactive. You can mouse-over the graph to view the number of changes made in the selected area for any month dating back to 2008.

You can discover more about the map and how it was made on the OSM Activity GitHub. You can also download the OSM activity data in GeoJSON format from the GitHub page.

Mapping India's Members of Parliament

Natafilter is a searchable interactive map of members of India's Lok Sabha. It allows you to select any election constituency on the map to discover the name (and other details) about it's Member of Parliament.

Using the map you can view details about each MP's educational qualifications, net assets and (probably most interesting) the number of criminal cases in which they have been involved. You can filter the data shown on the map to show either the education, net assets or criminal cases for each MP.

The map uses scaled circular markers for each MP on the map and different colors to show the level of education attained, the net assets owned or the number of criminal cases. So, for example, if you select to just view the number of criminal cases on the map the biggest orange markers on the map show the MP's who have been involved in the largest number of criminal cases.


You can also find out information about every member of the Lok Sabha using MP Track's Members of Parliament Map If you enter an address into the map you can discover the name of the local MP. You can then click through to find out about the MP's attendance, participation in debates, questions asked and private members bills submitted, from the MP Track database.

The Members of Parliament Map includes a number of other options, which allow you to view the number of male or female MP's, to filter the MP's by age-range or tenure, or to show all the MP's belonging to each of the political parties.

The map uses Fusion Tables for the back end, while Derek Eder's popular Searchable Map Template was used to create the data filtering options.

Animated Street View Driving Directions

You can create your own animated Street View driving routes with Map Channels' Animated Route Maps. Just enter a starting point and a destination into Animated Route Maps and you can view the entire route animated on Google Maps Street View.

The application provides a great way to preview a route before undertaking a journey. It can also be used to provide an animated Street View tour of any location around the world that you wish to explore on Google Maps Street View.

Animated Route Maps actually allows you to view your route in three connected map views. One window shows the route animated in Street View. The other two windows show the route using Google Maps' satellite and oblique aerial views. If you only want to view the animated route in Street View then you can click on the little 'full-screen' button in the Street View window.

Map Channels can also be used to provide a static Street View, Map and Bird's Eye view of any location in the world. Dual Maps combines Street View, Google Maps and Bird's Eye aerial views into one embeddable map. It's a great way to show your website users a location using three different map views of the same place.

Both Animated Route Maps and Dual Maps are free to use and can be embedded into your own website or blog by copying and posting the provided iframe code.

Mapping Gold at the Rio Olympics

The race is over and we can now announce the medal winners in the 2016 Olympic's mapping competition. So in reverse order:

The Bronze Medal

It has to be said that Fiasco Design went into this year's Olympics showing great form after their amazing showing at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. Their custom made interactive map for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games uses the same pictorial map style that they used in their original Sochi map.

The Rio 2016 Map is dotted with information about the major sporting venues in the Olympics and interesting facts about some of Rio's major landmarks. The map also contains a couple of interactive map games. The first game is a little treasure hunt in which you have to find dismembered body parts of a man hidden around the map. The other game involves finding a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who is hiding somewhere on this Fiasco Design map of Rio.

The Silver Medal

Google also created a wonderful interactive map for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Google's O Brasil Inteiro Joga - Mapa is a much more traditional interactive map than Fiasco Design's pictorial map. Google's map can therefore actually be used to navigate your way around Rio de Janeiro and to find the Olympic venues.

Google's map includes a number of wonderful pictorial overlays which highlight the Olympic venues and some of Rio's landmarks on the map. It also includes a wealth of information about the Olympic venues and the city (unfortunately for non-Portuguese speakers there isn't an option to view this information in English).

The Rio map is part of Google's integrated Brazilian platform for the Olympic games. As well as this map the platform features an Olympics news-feed and 42 original mini-games.

The Gold Medal

Not content with the silver medal Google has also gone all out for the Olympic gold with this fascinating map about Rio de Janeiro.

Beyond the Map - the Unexpected World of the Favelas is an interactive tour around Rio which concentrates on a number of individuals who have grown-up in the city's favelas. The tour uses a number of 360 degree interactive videos which transport you around the city. At each stop on the journey you can watch a YouTube interview with a local citizen in which you get to learn a little about their lives and dreams.

The use of aerial imagery, 360 degree videos and YouTube interviews provides a great introduction to the city and an interesting insight into life in Rio's favelas.

Explore the Music of the World

Spotify's Musical Map of the World allows you to listen to locally distinctive music in cities around the world. Using the Musical Map you can select from around a thousand global cities and listen to the music that appeals to local people who use the Spotify music streaming service.

When you select a city on the map you can view a Spotify playlist of the most popular distinctive music from that city. This playlist is not necessarily the most popular songs listened to on Spotify in the chosen city but the most 'distinctive'. In other words this is music that people in the chosen city listen to a lot, which people in other cities do not listen to so much.


If you are more interested in listening to locally created music than the music that the locals listen to then you can try the Radiooooo map instead. Radiooooo is a fun global music map which allows you to listen to music from anywhere in the world and from any decade going back to 1900.

If you aren't bothered about where in the world your music comes from you can also try the 'Taxi' option which allows you to listen to music from random countries. Radiooooo also includes the option to select the 'mood' of music that you wish to listen to (slow, fast or weird).


The American rock band Chicago were formed in Chicago. That might sound obvious but it actually turns out that most music artists with geographical based names don't seem to have any geographical connections with the places that they are named for.

So, how well do you know your geographically named rock bands?

Expedia's World of Music is a mapped based quiz with a difference. The object of the game is to identify the home locations of music artists with geographical based names. In the quiz you are played a series of songs by bands with geographical names. Your task is to click on the map to show where you think the band hails from (and not where their name might suggest).

Visualizing Continental Drift

GPlates is a 3d animation which shows how the Earth has evolved over millions of years. The map shows the Earth's shifting plate tectonics from 240 million years ago up until the present day.

As the animation plays through you can watch how the post-Pangaea Earth has formed as that super-continent drifted apart. The current land mass is shown beneath the shifting tectonic plates. You can therefore observe how the positions of the continents and countries we know today have moved around over the centuries due to the rifts in plate tectonics.

GPlates includes an option to view the same animation on top of a 2d map. It also includes controls which allow you to adjust the speed of the animation playback.


If you want an idea about how the rifts in plate tectonics and continental drift has effected the Earth's continents then you should also check out 'What Did the World Look Like'. This interactive 3d globe from Dinosaur Pictures travels back 600 million years to the dawn of multi-cellular life on Earth.

Of course that's just the beginning, What Did the World Look Like actually allows you to view how our planet has looked throughout the entire history of life on Earth. Here's what the Earth looked like in the Jurassic era, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth:


Using What Did the Earth Look Like you can view 3d globes from throughout Earth's history. The site includes two menus, which allow you to change the era visualized on the interactive 3d globe. The menu at the top-middle of the page allows you to select an era by age. The menu at the top right allows you to select a view based on the stages of life on Earth and by geologic period.