Axis maps blog is sharing an interesting technique for adding another dimension of data to maps by using transparency.  Somewhat like a cartogram, they’ve taken each county in the US and modified it based on population density, but instead of stretching it to a new size, they’ve increased the alpha transparency to make more populated areas brighter and less populated areas faded out. (more…)

A Standard 2008 Election Map (Upper), and a Cartogram skewed by Population (Lower)

Cartograms, or visualizations of an area skewed by some variable, are a powerful tool to control for disparities over a large area, especially with respect to politics.

A relatively large but sparsely populated area will dominate a standard projection, whereas a cartogram allows populated areas to be warped to show their true influence (See sidebar).

Applications of Cartograms:

Socio-economic data is the most obvious use case for cartograms, particularly data from the United Nations and National Elections.

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So unless you live under a non-Web 2.0-enabled rock, you’ve probably heard of the magic of the Google maps API and google maps mashups. If you’re saavy, you’ve probably even heard that now Google Maps offer translation of addresses into latitude and longitude, aka Geocoding.

What you may not know is that the folks at google exposed this geocoding as a regular old URL-based webservice, which means that whatever Nifty mashups your devious little minds can come up with (as long as they fly with google’s TOS) can be powered on the backend without ever loading a google map!
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