Bluesky Mapping

Update: I got busy and created a second map. Social Media Locations (comment below with suggestions for a better name). This map allows you to search for real-time Bluesky mentions of locations around the world. To start a search you just need to click on a map label for a country, state, city, town or neighborhood. 

Once you click on a place name messages will (often very slowly) begin to appear in the map sidebar. Warning: this is a real-time search of Bluesky messages so you may have to wait a very long time before someone actually mentions your location!

Yesterday I came across two interesting Bluesky visualizations.

Rainbow Sky (created by Martin Wattenberg) scans incoming Bluesky posts and draws a stripe every time it finds a color word. Martin’s map was inspired by EmojiRain (created by Jared Short)  (created by Jared Short), which scans Bluesky posts for emojis and animates those emojis as they fall from above.

Inspired by these two visualizations I've created the first Bluesky interactive map that I have seen (although almost definitely not the first to have been created). My map, US State Social, scans Bluesky posts for mentions of the 50 US states. When it detects a mention, it adds a marker to the map and displays the associated message in the map’s sidebar. Once the map has found messages for all 50 states, it removes all the markers and starts the process all over again.

All three visualizations leverage the power of WebSockets to work in real-time, making them dynamic and interactive. WebSockets allow the visualizations to maintain an open connection with the Bluesky platform, receiving incoming posts as they happen. This means that as new posts are made, the visualizations can instantly detect color words, emojis, or state mentions and update accordingly.

When I first started building US State Social, I had the idea of scanning all Bluesky posts for locations and adding a marker for every location mentioned. However, scanning every single word in every Bluesky message and sending each word to a geocoding service turned out to be inefficient - I quickly hit the rate limits for the geocoder. Then I came up with the idea of limiting markers to the 50 US states, which allowed me to avoid using a geocoding API. Now, I only need to scan Bluesky messages for 50 words, and since I already know the locations of all 50 states, I no longer need to rely on an external geocoding service.

Honestly, my map visualization really isn’t very interesting, but I thought I’d share a link to it in case anyone wants to try building their own Bluesky map. You can check out the code for the map on Glitch, and maybe even build a more interesting map yourself.

Mapping Mythical Islands & Imaginary Lands

Hy-Brasil is a mythical island, which was once believed to be located west of Ireland. According to legend, the island was typically shrouded in mist and only visible once every seven years. It appeared on several maps from the 14th to 16th centuries, often depicted as a circular island divided by a central river or strait.

Hy-Brasil is also shown in the Atlantic Ocean near Ireland on Map Myths, an interactive atlas exploring historical cartographic errors, myths, and misconceptions, such as phantom islands, mythical cities, and imaginary features. The site examines the origins of these legends, why they were included on maps, and how exploration eventually corrected these inaccuracies.

Map Myths is a captivating exploration of mythical and legendary locations, combining history, geography, and storytelling to uncover the origins of cartographic anomalies. The map provides detailed historical context and plausible explanations for these errors, revealing how myths like phantom islands and mythical cities were often products of misreported sightings and folklore. 

Map Myths earns lots of bonus points for being one of the first interactive maps I've seen which offers Arctic and Antarctic map projections. You can actually choose from five different projections (including Mercator, Mollweide and Robinson) but the Arctic and Antarctic projections are particularly useful for visualizing the locations of mythical lands in the extreme north or south. This includes Rupes Nigra, a legendary magnetic rock at the North Pole (believed to explain why compasses point north).

You can follow Map Myths on Bluesky, for regular updates on historcial cartographical anomolies. Maps Mania is also on Bluesky at @mapsmania.bsky.social

The World's Changing Climate Zones

Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time. It is more important than ever to visualize and understand its likely impacts. The new Köppen-Geiger Explorer hopes to meet this challenge by providing a powerful and interactive way to visualize climate zones and their transitions over time, based on the widely used Köppen-Geiger climate classification system.

The Köppen-Geiger climate classification system is one of the most widely used frameworks for categorizing the world's climates. It classifies climates based on observed temperature and precipitation patterns, dividing the Earth into five primary climate types, each with several subcategories.

The Köppen-Geiger Explorer is a new, innovative interactive map that visualizes how the world's climate zones are likely to change based on various climate model predictions. This tool allows users to explore past, present, and future climates, offering valuable insights into global and regional climate patterns. The map features two main filter controls that enable users to select a date range and explore different climate change scenarios. These controls make it possible to visualize how different scenarios might affect global climate zones at specific future dates.

For a country-specific perspective, the tool provides an intuitive Sankey diagram, summarizing past and future changes in climate zones. By selecting a country on the map, the diagram visualizes the flow of transitions between different climate categories, offering a detailed understanding of how these changes play out on a national scale.

The Pudding’s Climate Zones map also utilizes the Köppen climate classification to help visualize the global and local impacts of climate change. In Climate Zones - How Will Your City Feel in the Future? an  interactive map highlights the current climate zones of 70 global cities and projects the climate zones these cities will inhabit after global warming takes effect.

The Pudding’s Climate Zones map divides the world into the Köppen system’s five main climate zones -Arid, Tropical, Temperate, Cold, and Polar - along with their subcategories. At the end of the presentation, you can explore a detailed list of the 70 global cities categorized by their current climate zones. Selecting a city from this list reveals how it transitions into its future climate zone, accompanied by insights on how average temperatures in the city are expected to change due to global warming.

Your Global Local Radio Map

I'm currently listening to XEFO-AM from Mexico City, a radio station that seems to exclusively play classic, early 20th-century Spanish-language songs. The station is just one of about 100 local radio stations in Mexico City that appear on the Radiocast interactive map.

Radiocast is an interactive globe featuring over 7,000 radio stations broadcasting from around the world—all of which can be tuned into directly from the map. While Radiocast isn’t the first map to let you select radio stations by location, it boasts several features that might make it your go-to radio map.

One standout feature of Radiocast is its tag system, which lets you filter the 7,000+ radio stations by mood and genre. This makes it much easier to discover stations that match your personal tastes. If you’re not particular about mood or genre, you can use the ‘random’ feature to uncover a station from anywhere in the world. Radiocast also allows you to save your favorite stations, which are displayed as red hearts on the map.

My personal favorite feature is the sleep timer, which lets you set a timer for 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes—perfect for falling asleep to your favorite station.

However, one feature Radiocast seems to lack is the ability to share links to your favorite radio stations directly from the map. That’s a shame because the world truly needs to experience XEFO-AM. To find it, zoom in on Mexico City and look for the marker labeled ‘1030 AM’ (as that’s how it’s listed on the map).

Other Radio Maps

Radio Garden - (includes unique URLs which directly link to individual stations)

Radiooooo - no radio stations - but discover music by location and decade

Drive & Listen - watch driving videos from cities around the world while listening to a local radio station 

The Butterfly Superhighway

Every year, millions of Monarch butterflies undertake an epic journey across North America, traveling thousands of miles from their breeding grounds in the United States and Canada to their wintering habitats in central Mexico. In the spring, they then return to their northern locations in the United States and Canada.

What makes this migration even more astonishing is that no single butterfly completes the entire round trip. The Monarch migration is an extraordinary multi-generational journey, a relay race across generations, with each butterfly passing the baton to its offspring. The entire migration is too long for a single butterfly to complete in its lifetime and it takes multiple generations of Monarch butterflies to complete the journey north. Although a super-generation does make the entire return journey from North America to the wintering grounds in Mexico.

The Butterfly Superhighway invites you to join these incredible creatures on their long journey. The Butterfly Superhighway uses Google Earth and Google Street View to create a series of virtual Monarch butterfly migration journeys. By selecting one of the white route-line maps shown on the homepage, users can follow each incredible migratory journey across North America through a sequence of Street View panoramas and transitional 3D fly-overs captured on Google Earth.

I suspect there is no real map-coding involved in the Butterfly Superhighway. It seems that each migratory journey is simply a series of connected screen recordings made on Google Earth. Despite this, Butterfly Superhighway offers a visually engaging and accessible introduction to the Monarch butterfly's migration. However, "introduction" might be the operative word here, as the Butterfly Superhighway feels like a landing page for a broader website on Monarch butterflies - a website that has yet to be fully developed.

Via: Webcurios

Welcome to the Metaverse

Imagine a digital world layered seamlessly over our own, where every street corner and landmark is brought to life in 3D by a global community of gamers. This is Niantic’s vision for the real-world metaverse, and it’s already starting to take shape.

For several years, AR gaming company Niantic has been leveraging its hugely popular games, such as Pokémon GO and Pikman Bloom, to gather location data from around the world. Now, it has begun building the "real-world metaverse" with the help of its global network of active players.

Niantic’s real-world metaverse isn’t just a digital playground - it’s a collaborative effort to map the entire planet in 3D. High-level Pokémon players are now being enlisted to scan Niantic Wayspots, a vast network of points of interest that includes everything from iconic landmarks to hidden neighborhood gems. By simply walking around these sites with their phones, players capture detailed 3D meshes, which are then added to Niantic’s growing virtual map. By scanning local landmarks and hidden gems, players are effectively shaping a shared virtual world, one 3D model at a time. 

You can explore and browse Niantic's emerging real-world metaverse on Niantic Lightship's Geospatial Browser (requires free registration). The Geospatial Browser is an interactive map showcasing Niantic's Wayspots across the globe, many of which have now been turned into 3D models by Niantic volunteers.

The Geospatial Browser already appears to be populated with a vast number of user-submitted 3D scans of real-world locations. If you zoom in on your home on the map, you should be able to view several nearby locations as fully interactive 3D models (you can see me browsing my local neighborhood in the screen recording above).

If you'd like to build your own version of the metaverse, you can download any of the 3D meshes displayed on the Geospatial Browser as an FBX file (although I am uncertain about the licensing terms for using these models in your own projects).

Via: Digital Digging: Pokemon players create AR world

AI for Spatial Data Search

Aino claims to be 'the world’s first AI tool tailored specifically for retrieving and analyzing spatial data'. In essence, Aino is an AI-powered platform that allows you to search and (supposedly) download spatial data from over 10,000 datasets across more than 400 cities, covering points of interest (POI), urban infrastructure, social data, and much more.

How Easy is Aino to Use?

I found Aino fairly intuitive. In the free trial, you only get 10 queries, so I wasn’t able to explore Aino’s capabilities for very long. However, during my limited trial, I was able to define an area on the map and add various local points of interest, road linestrings, and building footprints within the search area.

Aino stands out for its use of natural language queries. Compared to Overpass Turbo, searching for spatial data with Aino is far more intuitive, as it doesn’t require knowledge of Overpass' complex query language. However, during my brief trial, I couldn’t test more advanced and complex spatial queries—an area where Overpass truly excels.

Can You Download the Data?

Aino includes a "Download and Share" button, which reportedly allows you to download your data as a GeoJSON or CSV file. However, no matter how many times I attempted to download my data as GeoJSON, I failed. This may well be user error, but whenever I asked Aino to show me data within a polygon area, all I could download was the polygon itself - not the actual data. Even when selecting "Export only visible layers" and hiding the polygon, Aino would still only export the hidden polygon instead of the visible data layers I wanted.

I may be missing something simple, but without the ability to download the data you’ve searched for, there isn’t much point in using Aino. It might be that Aino just needs to update their help guide on How to export the project in JSON to explain how to export spatial data from the map and not just the defining search polygons.

NYC's Subway Stories

New York City's subway network is a bustling artery that connects millions of New Yorkers to their daily lives. A new interactive map, Subway Stories, developed for the 2024 MTA Open Data Challenge, visualizes some of the stories and patterns that emerge from the rich flow of New York's subway ridership data. Drawing on comprehensive data from 2023, the visualization provides an unprecedented look at how the subway system functions as the lifeblood of the city, ferrying nearly four million passengers every day. 

The map is built on the MTA's Subway Origin-Destination Ridership dataset, a detailed collection of estimates that track the journeys of millions of riders. Although the MTA cannot directly record where each person exits, they use sophisticated algorithms to infer destinations based on where commuters start their next trip. This approach captures the complex network of journeys throughout the city, revealing the ways neighborhoods, work schedules, and events shape the daily rhythms of the subway system. By visualizing this information, Subway Stories paints a detailed portrait of New York's commuters, from the early morning rush of suburban workers pouring into Midtown to the late-night rides of performers and night-shift workers.

At the heart of the map are five stories: Fans at Flushing Meadows, A Tale of Five Chinatowns, Nightlife Along the L Train, The Weekend Shift, and How New York City Works. Each story looks at a subsection of the MTA data to reveal the unique rhythms and distinct communities that make New York's subway system so vibrant. From the surge of sports fans flocking to Flushing Meadows during the US Open, to the bustling activity of the city's diverse Chinatown neighborhoods, the narratives explore how different events, cultures, and industries shape the daily flow of commuters. Whether it’s the nightlife crowd hopping on the L train or essential workers heading to their weekend shifts, each story offers a glimpse into the heartbeat of the city, painting a detailed picture of how millions of people move through and interact with the subway system every day.

There are eight million stories in the naked city; these are only five of them. The map's creators are keen to learn if you also have a story to tell using the MTA's subway ridership data. If so - there is a short form that you can complete to share your story on the Subway Stories map.

If you are interested in creating your own scrollytelling data story then you might want to explore Mapbox's Interactive Storytelling: A low-code template to help you tell your map-based story. Alternatively you can start with Maplibre's Fly to a location based on scroll position demo map.

No Local News

"There are 206 counties in the United States with no news outlets. There are 1,561 counties with only one. More than two newspapers a week are closing, and print frequency is shrinking. Some 7,000 newspaper jobs were eliminated in the past year, almost 2,000 of them in newsroom positions." - The 2024 State of Local News Report

The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University has released its 2024 State of Local News Report. Every year, the report provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolving local news landscape in the United States. This year's edition highlights the growing challenges faced by local news outlets, including the continued decline of local newspapers, the spread of news deserts across communities, and the rapid rise of mergers and acquisitions as regional chains dominate the market. 

The Maps and Data section of the report features an interactive map that visualizes the number of news outlets in each county, including newspapers, digital sites, network sites, ethnic outlets, and public broadcasting. In counties that are not complete news deserts, users can click through to view the names of all local news outlets.

The report is not entirely focused on bad news. The Bright Spots in the Local News Landscape section includes a map highlighting some local news startups that are successfully navigating the challenges faced by traditional newspapers, websites, and broadcasters.

The Reemergence of Nuclear Power

When I reviewed the Nuclear Stations Map in August, I was surprised to see that, a little over a decade after the Fukushima disaster, Japan appears to be building at least three new nuclear power plants on its coastline. The Nuclear Stations Map shows all the nuclear plants in the world, whether decommissioned, in operation, or under construction. Currently, the map highlights over 60 new nuclear reactors being built around the globe.

After the Fukushima disaster, Germany decided to phase out nuclear power, a process completed in 2023. At the time, the environmental and human cost of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 seemed to signal the decline of nuclear power as a viable energy option for most countries. However, the war in Ukraine and the subsequent surge in energy prices appear to have sparked a renewed interest in nuclear energy.

The Straits Times directly addresses this resurgence in its scrollytelling story map On the nuclear trail: The dawn of a global renaissance in nuclear energy. Poignantly, this guided tour of the world’s renewed interest in nuclear power starts with just three locations highlighted on the world map: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima - the sites of the world’s three worst nuclear disasters.

The recent announcement that Microsoft had signed a deal to purchase nuclear power from Three Mile Island is emblematic of how energy security now seems to outweigh lingering fears of nuclear accidents. The Straits Times story map goes on to show the large number of nuclear power stations currently under construction across many countries. According to the accompanying article, “25 countries – including France, Japan, and the United States – have pledged to triple global nuclear energy capacity by 2050.”

The article is also illustrated with an interesting gridded cartogram that visualizes how much of each country’s electricity generation comes from fossil fuels, renewables, or nuclear energy. As you scroll through the article, individual countries are highlighted on the cartogram to explain the reasons behind their energy mix. For example, “In France, nuclear energy powers up to 70 percent of the country’s electricity needs. However, it has not built a new reactor since 1999 and is now planning to construct 14 more reactors by 2050.”

The reemergence of nuclear power signals a pivotal moment in the global energy landscape. Faced with the dual crises of climate change and energy insecurity, countries are increasingly turning back to a power source many had once sworn off. However, while the promise of clean, reliable energy is alluring, we shouldn't forget that past nuclear disasters have left parts of Chernobyl and Fukushima uninhabitable.