Senex Prime on flickr

The Hand Drawn Map Association is an ongoing archive of user submitted maps and other interesting diagrams created by hand. There are 150 maps submitted already including some lovely map collections.
Our current collection features a set of maps created by John Hutchison exploring his relationship to the 50 states in the US. The collection starts with a map representing all of the US states. Each successive map in the collection reveals a different set of states based on increasingly limiting criteria until we are left with only 1 state (his least favorite).

Image Credit: John Hutchinson April 29th – “US state I have Visited”

Mike Frumin’s map that show New York City subway ridership between 1905 to 2006 with sparklines for each station. Its great to see sparklines in use on a map, where the detail given by the sparkline is a kind of cartographic detail you can get lost in when looking at a map.
The general idea it that the history of subway ridership tells a story about the history of a neighborhood that is much richer than the overall trend.

NPR has some very nice visualizations of the United States electrical grid, including views for solar power and wind sources, including the the below which shows the realationship between where the good wind is, darker colors, and where the power grid is, not usually all that nearby.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.
Very nice animation showing the activity on the maps at OpenStreetMap.org
If you look closely you can see the edits I made in Jersey City last year.
Google updated Street View in the US today and have expanded the coverage quite a bit. What used to be a series of small puffy blue clouds covering mostly metropolitan areas has now become are sea of blue covering much of the nation.

After

Before

Virtual Cable technology that draws route information in an augmented reality display. The 3 dimensional display is created with lasers and mirrors (didn’t fully read that section) and is generated from standard route information output by numerous GPS and SatNav systems available today. The remarkable part about it is the simplicity of the system. “Follow the red line around until we tell you to stop.” The danger may be, as we have seen before, that the information is followed blindly, although keeping ones eyes on the road, and slightly above it, may be better for safety than trying to focus on small map screens, or to decipher the robo-voice directions to bear left in point-five-two miles.