Graphic Information – Maps

When I was a kid I used to hate maps, when I got to the car and someone asked me to guide I remember how frustrated I was with it, however today my affairs with graphic information and maps is almost daily and I´m always impressed by the insight that they provide.

This week three maps and one video specially called my attention:

First of all, it´s a project where 10M Facebook users were connected in between. According to Paul Butler, who started the project, visualizing data is like photography. I think Facebook should provide these data, which is different to Facebook places, because it could be handily be able to map your Facebook friends.

Secondly it was a project started in Norway to track and monitor any vessels from space, NASA and the European Space Agency have joined the project, and now it´s possible monitor live more than 60.000 ships.

Mapping America: Every City, Every Block was a widget created by New Your Times with information about ethnics, income, housing and families and education. If you are in the states and you don´t know who is around I invite you to take a look, just select the map enter any zip code and start analyzing, you will be amazed how diversified and sometimes segregate it is.

Last but not least, it´s the most ñoño of all. A group of Japanese kids went skydiving with google maps. They surrounded a room with blue plastic to simulate the sky, then sprayed it with white spray paint to simulate clouds and finally they used a projector to project a Google Earth sky-view upon the ground.

My little note for this post is that some phone apps, such as Navigate for Android or TomTom for IPhone were killing the GPS industry. So Garmin, one of the biggest GPS companies, decided to create a cellphone, called Nuvifone, to compete against Android and IPhone.