TileMill is a tool that makes it easy to create interactive maps. Soon they will be adding some new features that will treat maps more like images in terms of modifying the look and feel. This will allow you to apply blending to polygons and GIS data.

AJ Ashton made these examples that are quite compelling, beautiful, and just touch on the possibilities. I can envision many different types of data being drawn with blending techniques as opposed to simply flow diagrams and the like. It will be interesting to see what comes out of these new features.

[via @bonnie]

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Help is a drug company that offers you less. Less active ingredients, less waste, less confusion, less greed. Its tongue-in-cheek website has a map of its latest sales data called "What's wrong U.S.?" A bar chart for each state shows how many people are buying products for particular maladies.

So why are the inner northwest states having problems sleeping? My guess they're up late worrying about gay marriage.

What is Missing? by Maya Lin seeks to raise awareness about the mass extinction of species. It has a beautiful interface. The world map is black on a sea of black. Your mouse acts as a sort of flashlight layered between land and water, showing you glimpses of familiar coastlines and allowing you to select dots that tell the stories of extinction.

We are experiencing the sixth mass extinction in the planet's history, and the only one to be caused not by a catastrophic event, but by the actions of a single species - mankind. On average, every 20 minutes a distinct living species of plant or animal disappears. At this rate, by some estimates, as much as 30 percent of the world's animals and plants could be on a path to extinction in 100 years.

The site states that the dots on the world map each represent a species, place, or natural phenomenon that has disappeared or significantly diminished. Unfortunately, this is a very vague concept. I chose a dot titled "Earth" that described the abundance of life in a cup of soil. Another dot named "Migration" discussed how the natural phenomenon of migration was disappearing around the world. It seemed so loosely related to extinction that I felt the mission of the piece fell short. You can also view the dots by year, however, I felt it only added to my confusion because it doesn't seem to chronicle actual extinctions.

I typically love Maya Lin's work, so this site was surprisingly disappointing and certainly not her best piece of data visualization (see Vietnam Veterans Memorial).

Nicolas Rapp dives into the patterns and growth of worldwide shipping in a six-page spread for Fortune Magazine.

Nearly 90% of all goods traded across borders travel, in part, by sea. Typically a ship will undertake six voyages a year. The fastest-growing routes are between ports in Asia, while goods moving out of that continent account for 43% of all maritime trade, according to IHS Global, an economic forecasting firm. Today the most heavily trafficked sea route is between China and the West Coast of the U.S. The total value of goods that travel from China to the U.S. is four times that of those on the return trip—a clear symbol of America's trade deficit.

Despite a gap of a few centuries, the routes today still look a lot like the ones from the 18th century.

Researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University investigate the structure of cities in Livehoods, using foursquare check-ins.

The hypothesis underlying our work is that the character of an urban area is defined not just by the the types of places found there, but also by the people who make the area part of their daily routine. To explore this hypothesis, given data from over 18 million foursquare check-ins, we introduce a model that groups nearby venues into areas based on patterns in the set of people who check-in to them. By examining patterns in these check-ins, we can learn about the different areas that comprise the city, allowing us to study the social dynamics, structure, and character of cities on a large scale.

It's most interesting when you click on location dots. A Livehood is highlighted and a panel on the top right tells you what the neighborhood is like, related neighborhoods, and provides stats like hourly and daily pulse and a breakdown location categories (for example, food and nightlife). Does foursquare have anything like this tied into their system? They should if they don't.

There's only maps for San Francisco, New York City, and Pittsburgh right now, but I'm sure there are more to come.

Want more on the clustering behind the maps? Here's the paper [pdf].

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Welcome to Anthropocene:

Scientific concepts like the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and planetary stewardship have heralded a profound shift in perception of our place in the world: a growing evidence base of scientific observations show we have become the prime driver of global environmental change. These new concepts are powerful communication tools as we move towards global sustainability.

There's also a non-narrated version, but I like the narration. It helps you better appreciate what you're seeing. Oh yeah, and ooohh, purdy.

[via infosthetics]

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I've never played Minecraft, but maybe this map showing live server connections means something to those who do. "A dot is a server or a client. Lines are traced from clients connecting to servers. Lone dots are local servers." They also have raw hardware data available for download. [Thanks, Erik]

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One aspect of EIS is an extensive portfolio of single-frame photos celebrating the beauty–the art and architecture–of ice. The other aspect of EIS is time-lapse photography; currently, 27 cameras are deployed at 18 glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, the Nepalese Himalaya, Alaska and the Rocky Mountains of the U.S. These cameras record changes in the glaciers every half hour, year-round during daylight, yielding approximately 8,000 frames per camera per year. We edit the time-lapse images into stunning videos that reveal how fast climate change is transforming large regions of the planet.

Some of the videos span four years, from 2007 to 2011, and it's amazing to see the sped-up dynamic of the ice. I like this one, which Balog refers to as the cat's paw. It looks like a big paw of ice reaching into the ocean.

[via Boing Boing]

Related

• Time-lapse of Earth from International Space Station
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• History of the sky

The MIT SENSEable City Lab, in partnership with BBVA, visualizes spending in Spain during Easter of 2011. The animation shows the activity of 1.4 million people and 374,220 businesses, over 4 million transactions.

The map is less interesting to me since I'm a non-Spaniard (population density?), but the categorizations and spending volume over time is fun to see. Groceries are shown in blue, gas stations in yellow, fashion in pink, and red in bars and restaurants. During the day, you see people filling up the tank, and then as evening comes, the city centers and coast lights up red.

[via @pkedrosky]

The Eatery app by Massive Health lets people snap pictures of their food and rate the healthiness. The premise is that you don't have to carefully count calories to lose weight. You just need to be more aware of what you eat. Using 7.68 million ratings over a five-month span, Massive Health maps eating healthiness over an aggregated 24-hour time window.

Mouse back and forth over the map slowly to see the changes. It's interesting that as night falls, desserts and midnight snacks make themselves known and then the green comes back in the morning.

[Thanks, Thomas]