This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Web Trend Map 2008 Beta, which is basically 300 influential web sites mapped onto a Tokyo train map. It’s very pretty, but once again, kottke.org gets no love.
Update: A general trend map for 2008, this one modeled on the Shanghai subway map. (via mass custom., thx maaike)
Stamen teamed up with MySociety to produce some lovely travel-time maps of London. My favorite is the interactive travel + housing prices map:
Next, it is clearly no good to be told that a location is very convenient for your work if you can’t afford to live there. So we have produced some interactive maps that allow users to set both the maximum time they’re willing to commute, and the median house price they’re willing or able to pay.
The commute time slider makes a lovely Mandelbrot-esque pattern as you pinch the times together. (via o’reilly radar)
Map of the world where the size of the countries correspond to how much oil they have. On this map, the Middle East is just The Middle.
Click on world cities on a map to test your traveler IQ. Africa = nearly random clicking for me although I would have done better had I not misread Swaziland as Switzerland.
This post about the carbon footprint of wine contains an interesting map at the bottom. It’s a map of the US with a line splitting the country in two. West of the line, it is more carbon efficient to drink Napa wine while to the east of the line it is more carbon efficient to drink French Bordeaux. You can almost see the coastline of the eastern and Gulf states struggling westward against the trucking route from California. The Vinicultural Divide?
19.20.21 (19 cities in the world with 20 million people in the 21st century) is a nice site for an effort to undertake “a five-year study that will encompass all aspects of the phenomenon of supercities” but the real attraction are the maps of the world’s largest cities through time (Menu/10 Largest Cities). In 1000, the largest city in the world was Cordova, Spain and by 1500, 4 of the top 10 were in China and one was in Nepal. (via snarkmarket)
Subway map geeks rejoice:
Transit Maps of the World is the first and only comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit system on earth. Using glorious, colorful graphics, Mark Ovenden traces the history of mass transit-including rare and historic maps, diagrams, and photographs, some available for the first time since their original publication. Transit Maps is the graphic designer’s new bible, the transport enthusiast’s dream collection, and a coffee-table essential for everyone who’s ever traveled in a city.
Found out about this from Boing Boing, where Cory has a quick review.
A tshirt featuring a subway map representation of the human gastrointestinal system. (thx, sami)
Update: Oh, and I plumb forgot the Threadless Metropolitan Cardiac Authority tshirt. (thx, sam)
A gorgeous wall-sized map showing the precise territory of the United States by Bill Rankin, proprietor of Radical Cartography. Check out some of Rankin’s other recent work.
Update: Oops, that didn’t take long. RC is a little slow right now because everyone’s trying to d/l the 3.8 MB png file of the map. Maybe check back a little later?
A neat comparison of butcher’s diagram of cuts of beef and a map of Manhattan. It looks like I live in Chuck Shortribs or maybe Brisket. See also the front cover of Rats by Robert Sullivan.
Timelapse animated map of the NYC subway that shows the order of the subway lines being built. See also the history of the NYC subway, photos of the IRT’s first stations, and if you really don’t have anything else to do for the next hour or so, an extensive trove of historical NYC subway maps.
Statetris: “Instead of positioning the typical Tetris blocks, you position states/countries at their proper location.” There are versions for the US, Africa, Europe, the UK, and more.
Get Lost is a collection of maps of downtown Manhattan drawn by a variety of artists.
A must-see for football fans: NFL TV distribution maps. Check out what football games will be on in which parts of the country.
A list of resources for my recent dive into the deep end of an infinite pool. Wikipedia page. Search inside @ Amazon. A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest. Reviews, Articles, & Miscellany. The Howling Fantods! A scene-by-scene guide. Hamlet. Act 5, Scene 1. Infinite Jest online index. Wiki from Walter Payton College Prep (incl. timelines, chars, acronym list, places, etc.). Chronological list of the years in Subsidized Time. Notes on What It All Means. Character profiles by Matt Bucher. Character guide. Vocabulary glossary. Various college theses on IJ. Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (sadly not out until Nov). Not entirely unrelated: map of the overworld for The Legend of Zelda, which I’ve started playing again on the Wii. Suggestions welcome, especially looking for a brief chronological timeline of the whole shebang, something like the chronologically sorted version of this but covering more than just when the scenes themselves take place.
Update: Just to be clear, this is my second time through the book. (Last time was, what, 4 years ago?) Trying to make more of a study of it this time.
Update: Suggestion from Ian: “Get 3 bookmarks. 1 for where you are reading, 1 for the footnotes, 1 to mark the page that lists the subsidized years in order.” I’m currently using two bookmarks…will get a third for the sub. years list.
I’ve been keeping up with the latest iPhone news but I haven’t been telling you about it…partially because my poor pal Merlin is about to pop an artery due to all the hype. Anyway, it’s Friday and he’s got all weekend to clean that up, so here we go. The big thing is a 20-minute guided tour of the device, wherein we learn that there’s a neat swiping delete gesture, you can view Word docs, it’s thumb-typeable, the earbuds wires house the world’s smallest remote control, Google Maps have driving directions *and* traffic conditions, and there’s an “airplane mode” that turns off all the wifi, cell, and Bluetooth signals for plane trips. It looks like the iPhone will be available online…here’s the page at the Apple Store. What else? It plays YouTube videos. iPhone setup will be handled through iTunes: “To set up your iPhone, you’ll need an account with Apple’s iTunes Store.”
Artist Eve Mosher is drawing a chalk line around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan that denotes the encroachment of the ocean if it were to rise 10 feet above the current sea level. There’s a web site for the project, including a progress blog. See also Flood Maps.
A map of the lakes and rivers underneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Referring page is here. (via pruned)
Pirate myths uncovered: they never said “arrr”, there was no plank walking, and no treasure maps. The “arrr” and the pirate accent “originated with Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in the movies and on TV through much of the 1950s”.
The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World scores the world’s countries on two axes of cultural values…from “traditional” to “secular-rational” and from “survival” to “self-expression”. (via strange maps)
I’m sure this functionality is coming, but when using the new Street View feature in combination with driving directions on Google Maps, I want a play button that drives me from the starting point to my destination, showing me the street-level view along the way.
outside.in just launched a new maps feature that shows the physical locations that people are blogging about. Here’s the last few months of places I’ve talked about on kottke.org. I like the pie charts that show how exclusive a place is to a particular blog. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to outside.in.)
Stamen delivers another lovely project: Trulia Hindsight. It’s an animated map of the US which shows new home construction over a period of years “with an eye towards exposing patterns of expansion and development”. As you might expect, the growth of a city like Las Vegas is interesting to watch. More on the project from Stamen and on the Trulia Hindsight blog.
Map of Manhattan made up of the countries of origin of its residents. (via strange maps)
New Google Maps feature: Street View. Just place your little guy on a street on the map and up pops a 3-D panorama of what you’d see on the street. For instance, here’s a view into oncoming traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. Only major US cities are supported for now. I remember Amazon’s A9 came out with something like this a couple of years ago, but Google’s implementation of it is fantastic. (thx, mark)
A “story map” distributed to guests of a wedding that shows the possible occupational, relational, and recreational relationships between guests to be used as a conversational cheat-sheet. Reminiscent of Mark Lombardi’s network maps. Better larger. (via gulfstream)
Another kind of Tube map: which seating/standing positions in the carriage are the best and which are the worst? “Everyone knows the prime seats and standing spots, and people jostle for supremacy when the doors open, especially at the depot, when the train is empty.”
Timelapse video of a map showing Civil War battles and movements…four years of war in four minutes. The video was produced by Harvest Moon Studio for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
Socials & More