Design, Science and Technology

Ever wonder how many meteors have hit Earth? The Meteoritical Society is doing its best to keep track. And Javier de la Torre, co-founder of CartoDB, is helping us see the pure volume of hits (into the tens of thousands). His interactive visualization shows a heatmap of hits all over the world, letting you explore where and when meteorites fell, as well as their size and classification.

Via Lauren Moss

An artist has created a hand-drawn map of the Internet, where Google, Apple, and porn are continents.

The world of the Internet mirrors the real-world in myriad ways: there are members (we call them populations), websites (destinations to visit), acquisitions of companies (redrawn political boundaries). So what if the Internet could be visualized like our global politics?

That’s exactly what designer Martin Vargic did in this cartographic experiment which treats mega-companies such as Google, Microsoft, HP, and Apple like empires, on a classic world map. To explain the dominance and relationships of these entities, Vargic created a visual hierarchy that gives prominent treatment to companies with the most users (or sites with the most visitors), surrounding them with smaller states and townships named after adjacent businesses.

 

More details at the link...

Via Lauren Moss

An EU-funded project is building platforms to detect patterns in how people use urban spaces.

 

Maps don't typically convey time very well. They're static snapshots of a moment in history. A handful of animated maps that do a good job combining time and space using either transit data or geo-tagged social-media hits.

Now a new project, called Geographies of Time, is trying to do something similar with a more typical two-dimensional map. The effort is part of a broader EU-funded projects called UrbanSensing that's building platforms to detect patterns in how people use urban spaces.

Via Lauren Moss

By Franck Ernewein, Tweetping is a map that shows where everyone in the whole world is tweeting from in real time.

Much like Poptip’s treatment of Twitter, you’re not really meant to follow it all. Country-by-country tickers do track the total tweets, words, and characters sent since you signed on, but hashtags and @-mentions flash for milliseconds, constantly replaced by a stream of data that can’t be paused for a moment, lest the system fall perpetually behind. Meanwhile, the geolocations of each tweet make their way to a world map as a glowing dot. As the tweets pile up, so do the dots, meaning the world transforms from prehistoric shadows to blindingly bright connectivity in a matter of minutes.

Via Lauren Moss

Sightsmap forms an aggregation of the most photographed buildings by integrating Google's Panoramio, which allows users to tag a location or attraction within their photo.

 

In a colorful gradient of purples, reds, and yellows, the website reveals the most photographed places around the globe. Broad patches of purple coincide with a lesser amount of photographs, while smaller clusters of yellow reveal the locations where people can't seem to put their cameras down. Unsurprisingly, the densest areas of yellow are the world's most popular tourist spots − including New York City and cities across Europe such as Istanbul.

Sightsmap is more than just a map of tourist destinations however; it also shows the close connection between architecture and what inspires people to take photos. Sightsmap forms an aggregation of the most photographed buildings by integrating Google's Panoramio, which allows users...

Via Lauren Moss

Google earth has partnered with a research team at the University of Maryland in the realization of an interactive, digital map that highlights global deforestation.

The data used has been compiled from the results of a decade long analysis of 654,178 landsat images. each color indication on the interface corresponds to collected informational evidence: red -- forest loss from 2000-2012; blue -- forest gain from 2000-2012; magenta -- both loss and gain; green -- forest extent.

Via Lauren Moss

A map from the Oxford Internet Institute reveals the geographical distribution of billions of photos uploaded to the popular image-sharing site.

Individually, each of those photos shows us something, some flash of a moment on this Earth. All together, they show us something else, a planet pulsing—unevenly—with photo documentation...

Via Lauren Moss