Thoughts and adventures in maps, Flash, visualization, and anything in between

Archive for October 2008

Mapping tag clouds

Over on the Axis Maps blog I’ve written up a side project I began several months ago but never got very far on: mapping the geography of presidential campaign speeches. It’s still an interesting idea, but my colleagues and I didn’t have the time to fully develop it, so you’ll have to settle for [...]

Blog-on-blog action: Axis Maps blog

I wish to call attention to the fact that my humble little company Axis Maps has launched a new blog. This blog, I must stress, does not exist merely to promote ourselves, but rather to talk about practical cartography. So please stay tuned to it while our Ph.D. holders Mark Harrower and Ben [...]

Faking a progressive image download in Flash


So I have a single map that I need to show at several different scales in an interactive fashion. It’s got to be a pretty big image to look decent when I zoom in, so that means a large file and a long download. But I only need to [...]

GeoCommons Maker! Awesome or super awesome?

After a summer of long hours and occasional vagarancy, I’m happy to report that GeoCommons Maker! has launched today.  FortiusOne’s CEO Sean Gorman nicely sums up what Maker (I’m going to go ahead and drop the exclamation point henceforth) is all about:
Data that was once the sole providence of GIS professionals can now be mapped [...]