geobloggers

Where 2.0 has finished now, although it carries on with WhereCamp. It was fun and the first one I’ve been to where I didn’t have to do any talking, which makes it doubly fun, possible for everyone. I missed Wednesday, but managed some of the workshops on Tuesday and talks on Thursday.

There are a few thing I want to comment on (new Yahoo! stuff, Flickr Shapefiles for example) but for the time being… Making Maps.

… quoting Kellan always add an extra level of sophistication to a presentation!

Anyway, there were a couple of workshops; Maps from Scratch: Online Maps from the Ground Up (where that slide above is from) and Be a Cartographer: Thinking About the Design of Maps, that suggest that people are looking beyond just adding maps to sites and throwing pins on to show data, to actually thinking about the form and function of maps.

Obvious people have been thinking about the form and function of maps for a long time, I’m just saying it’s “new” in the way that online maps were “new” a few years ago.

(You can find out more about Maps From Scratch at http://www.mapsfromscratch.com/).

What I particularly enjoyed about Maps from Scratch from the Stamen team is that what they do is very much like the Penn & Teller Cup and Balls Routine …

… in that, by using clear cups Penn & Teller show that what makes the “magic” in the trick is not concealing secret knowledge but just by being very good at what they do, the slight of hand, distractions and so on.

And that’s Stamen, Michal showed us all the tools (mapnik, TileCache etc.) that they use, the mystical command-line incantations needs to summon new tiles into existence and so on. Michal started by showing us a selection of finished tile sets (Cup and Balls with the Red Plastic cups) and then, from start-to-finish producing a new set of map tiles from thin air, including the how-to part.

And yet, even knowing how it’s all done, being able to watch it over and over again, it’ll take a fair bit of practice before getting that good.

Overall, impressed.