A couple of interesting uses of maps on the web

jfs has often pointed out what the web can do in terms of making interesting spatial representations available quite widely. Here's two I'd like to share.

The Guardian is reporting today on a team from Cornell who've taken the number of photos of "landmarks" on Flickr as a proxy for photographers' movements and plotted the density on maps, presenting a paper at WWW 2009 (more images at the end of the paper).

The second I came across listening to a BBC podcast of Thinking Allowed on the way in to work this morning. Laurie Taylor was discussing an exhibition currently in Leeds of images of the social order and how they reflect the social philosophies of the times. This one is a representation of relative wealth by country, distorting the conventional map. It comes from
The University of Sheffield and is the last in series that attempt to show how that distribution has changed over 2000 years.

And further to the last

The world wealth maps come from the Social and Spacial Inequalities Research Group at Sheffield, with a site of the various maps available separately. There's an awful lot of other comparative maps as well.