Tech 4D

I just returned from the Where2.0 conference. One of the speakers made the observation that “pushpins are the cartographic measles of our time“ during her somewhat condescending presentation on cartographic style and design. I have to say that I agree with her on this point. She was talking, of course, about the ubiquitous icons found splattered over web rendered maps denoting the presence of anything from a car dealer to a National Geographic episode.

I condescendingly call them lollypops and I would love to see most of them go away. It has been 12 years since mapquest became the first mainstream mapping site and in all of that time the only novel thing that has happened to those little splotches is that somebody put a drop shadow underneath them.

Happily things are beginning to change. During the Where 2.0 conference there were at least three pretty demos that offer hope:

1. Yahoo Research displayed a great tag based map
   
   
2. ESRI showed some cool web service APIs that can be used to do GISey things to your maps. The GIS community are masters at avoiding lollypops and have been using clever visualization techniques for years.
3. The National Holocaust Museum showed some very striking and powerful visualizations of the Darfur crisis using Google Earth. Aside from the normal icons, there are bar charts showing population of displaced persons.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 8:39 am and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.