Geographic
Co-ordinated marketing
A little while back I was having a pint or two with my brother in a local pub when he spotted the offer of a promotional t-shirt for customers who were drinking the Fullers Discovery Blonde Beer. By the end of the night, they kindly gave us two of the t-shirts to take home (we got the impression they had quite a few left to give away).
The t-shirts had marketing for the Discovery beer on the front and, in the spirit of the name, also had a compass on the back with a pair of geographic coordinates within it. Recognising them as coordinates in the London area, I didn't think too much more about it, presuming they were the coordinates of the pub that was selling the beer, or of the Fullers Brewery that produced it, but it wasn't until the other day that I actually tapped the coordinates (51º29'15.24"N, 0º14'56.96"W) into Google Maps and - after switching to the satellite imagery view - discovered that this was all a part of the brewery's larger marketing strategy.
Presumably not too far off the flight path for Heathrow airport, and always under the attentive gaze of the electronic eyes in the sky, the Fuller's Brewery had used the prime marketing real estate of their roof to advertise themselves to the world. Of course this isn't a new strategy, with many other companies and organisations doing the same thing around airport areas for year, but the coordinated (excuse the pun) approach did strike me as a nice way to market their product.
Having said that, unlike in the early days in the web when, purely out of curiosity, I'd visit any URL I saw advertised, I don't think I'd do the same with a pair or coordinates that I saw on the back of someone's t-shirt...
Note: Aerial imagery copyright Google
Old Ordnance Survey maps
When I was looking for old maps of the Isle of Man a couple of years ago, I came across a great source of old maps of towns across Britain and Ireland (as well as a couple of the Isle of Man and other places in Europe). I didn't mention them in the post (I perhaps hadn't found them at that point) but I've recently had a bit of an interest in the history of the area around where I'm living, so went back to this supplier to order some old maps of the Elephant and Castle area of London.
Alan Godfrey has been building up an impressive collection of reprints of old Ordnance Survey Maps from the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. The maps, collectively known as The Godfrey Edition, are reproductions of original maps, often scaled down slightly, but printed in extraordinary quality considering the age of the originals.
As described on their website:
Most of the maps are highly detailed, taken from the 1/2500 plans and reprinted at about 14 inches to the mile. They cover towns in great detail, showing individual houses, railway tracks, factories, churches, mills, canals, tramways and even minutiae such as dockside cranes, fountains, signal posts, pathways, sheds, wells, etc.. Each map includes historical notes on the area concerned. Many also include extracts from contemporary directories. The maps are neatly folded, often with an early photograph on the cover. The maps are ideal for local historians, transport historians, and family historians, or simply those with an interest in the town they live in or have visited. The maps are very good value and cost just £2.25 each.
Whenever I've bought maps from them (their whole catalog is online in their map shop) I've found them to be very responsive, with the maps often arriving the next day. Alan Godfrey was also open to the use of names from old maps for the OpenStreetMap project (where they were still relevant, as they often were in Peel in the Isle of Man, where much of the historical street layout still exists).
So, if you're interested in the history of the area around you, I highly recommend these maps as a great start to learning more about how things used to be.
Making maps from OpenStreetMap geodata
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I spent some time last year making some maps of the Snaefell Mountain Course (and other roads) on the Isle of Man so that I could add an overview map to the Wikipedia entry for the course.
Last night I was trying out some of the options in the OpenStreetMap 'export' tab, and since it can now export SVG (scalable vector graphics) files, I thought I'd have a try at redoing the maps from last year in a more re-usable and editable form using vector graphics instead of bitmaps.
To make the SVG map using data from OpenStreetMap (as shown in the preview), I just followed some relatively simple steps and a little trial and error while using the graphics editor.
I thought I'd share some of the steps below, in case anybody else was interested in making maps from the great data becoming available in the OpenStreetMap project.
So, what's needed to make your own custom maps?
- An area of OpenStreetMap that's got enough information in it to be useful for your purpose.
If the data you want is not all there, or you want to add more, see the beginners' guide and the map making guide to get you started off adding or improving data in the project. - An SVG image generated from OpenStreetMap using the export tab.
To export your vector graphic file, zoom the main map into the area you want to export, click on the export tab, tweak the area you're interested in (if necessary), select 'Mapnik image' and 'SVG' from the options and click Export. Experiment with the scale to see what the results are, but initially the default scale will probably suffice. - A vector graphics editor such as Adobe Illustrator or, even better, an open source editor such as Inkscape.
Open the downloaded SVG file in your editor and you should see a nice pretty OpenStreetMap image there. To start to work on it, it's a good idea to 'ungroup' the items so that you can edit them individually (I had to do this twice to fully separate out all the objects). You'll notice that the map is made up of many objects, one for each node and way you'd normally see rendered on the maps at openstreetmap.org. You'll also notice that text annotations (names, road references, etc.) are all broken down to their constituent characters too. - Some time to do some (at times quite fiddly) image editing and map making.
You can get some results out in a relatively short timeframe, but you'll likely want to improve the map over time as you become more familiar with the data and tools available.
What steps were needed to create the TT map?
- Select all the items and fade them (I lowered the level of transparency, but there are probably better ways of doing it).
- Select the text items, group each the characters of each name together to make it easier to edit them, re-emphasise them, and change their size if desired.
- Select any other items that should be re-emphasised and do that (I did the sea and the land).
- Select each element of the subject that you'd like to highlight (for me, this was each way that makes up the course) and change the styling of it (I increased the size, and re-emphasised the original colours). I also combined them all into a single 'path' and joined the end of each one to the end of the next (using the 'Edit paths by nodes' ad 'Join selected end nodes' tools) to make it fill in the gaps that appear between them.
Hopefully this short tutorial (well, documentation of my first steps) was helpful for other budding neo-cartographers out there. If you've made your own maps from OpenStreetMap data and have any hints and tips that may be useful, please feel free to add a comment to this post.
OpenStreetMap change monitoring: OSM Mapper
Change monitoring software has something that's long been desired in the OpenStreetMap community - the ability to easily see what changes have been made in your areas, and by who. I've been excited to see this week that it's finally come to fruition in the form of OSM Mapper from ITO World.
Their blog post gives some more information about what it can do:
Using this product you can set up one or more areas to monitor and analyse in a variety of ways. You can even establish RSS feeds to get alerts when other people make changes within areas of interest. You can also generate beautiful images to download and post anywhere as (CC-by-SA).
... plus all sorts of mapping products that highlight changes over time, changes by contributor, etc.
I've been trying it out this morning to try and identify people who have recently contributed to the OpenStreetMap dataset of the Isle of Man, to try and make sure I don't give anyone a big shock when importing the new dataset from CloudMade, and hopefully to encourage others to help out once it's imported, to identify if anything is still missing.
I have to say I've been pretty impressed at how well it works, and how quickly I've identified the major recent contributors and where they've been editing.
Is your business on the map?
Did you know that you can list your business for free on Google Maps and have it highlighted to people who are searching the map for businesses like yours within a certain area?
When I was building the Cronk-e-Dhooney Cottage B&B website a few months back, I was looking for ways to promote it. I added it to TripAdvisor to give it some visibility in the world of travel (and it's recently had its first glowing review) and then tried to add it to Google Maps using the Local Business Center.
Trying to add it, I stumbled when it came to entering the address (which doesn't have a street name, and has a Manx postcode, which wasn't recognised by Google). Without a working address, there wasn't a chance of getting it listed.
When I saw today's release of Google Maps for the Isle of Man, I thought I'd give the process another shot this evening, and try once again to add Cronk-e-Dhooney Cottage to the map. This time it worked much better (though not painless, as it still didn't like the postcode) and I've managed to get the information (and a couple of the photos I could get it to accept) onto the map. For the extended profile that pops up on the map, you can add photos and a wealth of information about your business.
Now, do a search for bed and breakfast in the Isle of Man and you'll see the cottage come up in pole position. With free publicity like this, can you afford not to have your local business on the map?
Tip: When adding the address, type it all out except for the postcode, click the link to change the location of the pin on the map, move it to pinpoint your property, and only then add your postcode. That's the only way I could get it to accept the address.
