Viking

This is a really cool visualization of “similar artists”, as captured by the Last.FM API. Genres are represented as colors. Very tasty.

Smashing magazine has a great romp through all kinds of different ways maps can/should be used in web design, showing many different styles, and how those styles can be used to convey information. There’s more to life than Google maps. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/04/06/maps-in-modern-web-design/

The site Visual Complexity has a wonderful array of web oriented visualizations – things of art, really. Now if I can just get them to list Codexmap

Maps and Books have always interested me, independently from each other. I recently spent a fair bit of time exploring their intersection, via my website CodexMap, which is a Google Maps / Amazon Books / LibraryThing / Geocoding mashup, letting you interactively explore a Google Map to find & place books.

Imagine my delight at finding someone taking this intersection to the next level. Literature in a map, not on a map. Via Bruce Sterling’s blog on Wired, and Entropist, I found “The 21 Steps” – a creation of Charles Cumming, the author of “Typhoon“. It’s a story (a takeoff of “The 39 Steps“), told via an interactive Google Map. It’s Great Fun. Check it out.

GoogleMaps Mania did a very nice review of Codexmap yesterday. Gmaps mania is a great resource if you are interested in Google maps applications (but then if you are interested in that, you’ve probably already been to the site 8)).

He’s recently done a nice roundup of hardware-oriented product integrated with Google Maps, including the particularly interesting Pharos Trips & Pics Geologger.

Codexmap is live. An interactive books/maps experience. The basic idea is finding books on an interactive Google Map, based on the setting(s) of the book. You can find it here: http://www.codexmap.com. You can read more about it here: http://www.codexmap.com/help.htm.

Here’s a screenshot where I’ve navigated to the location “Sparta”.

Enjoy!