Sing for your State

There are some internet ideas that sound as if they've been thought up with tongues firmly in cheek, but when you look them over you discover they're totally serious.  This is the case with Australia by Song.  

 

The concept is simple, its a directory of songs about Australia, searchable by states or by text query.  There are a lot of quite comical songs about Australia - that's why I thought it was going to be a whimsical offering.  But it's not, it's quite serious, with an example of the lyric in question and a link to the Youtube page as well as the Title of the song, the Artist and the Location it refers to. 

 

It's missing quite a few mentions from The Whitlams though, so I've let them know.  They don't have a proper map search either, and I've suggested that too.  It's not the most relevant site to point out for house hunters - unless you want to move somewhere worth singing about - but it does prove just how versatile the ol' map format is.

 

 

Keep your city tidy

Some cities look like they could do with some rearranging and neatening up...  And the person to take on this task is clearly Armelle Caron, who has mapped and then rearranged the grids of these cities into tidier places to live...

Especially in the case of New York:

Still on about the relative size of things!

Here's something visual to ponder for a Thursday:

You've probably seen the one where someone's fitted loads of countries into Australia? If not it's on the blog here.  Well, this one says even more about the relative size and populations and wealth of places.

Australia hasn't been inserted into Africa this time, but for a point of reference, here's Australia laid over Europe:

Thanks to David McCandless and his blog Information is Beautiful for collecting these together, you can see more of them on the rest of his post here, as well as all the creators credits (when known).

Bigger is better - redux

We're from one of the world's largest, emptiest countries...

Care of the National Archives of Australia 

And the Nestoria offices are a little bit competitive about things, population, weather etc.  So while I frequently hold 'our' own on weather and size, I do poorly in anything to do with people, historic colonial powers and famous people.  Yes, we have Kylie and Russell Crowe, but that's not really going to cut it against the hundreds of thousands more people that have been citizens of Spain or the UK.  So this map, where populations are re-located into more suitably sized countries, has been passed around and debated quite a bit.  It's not clear who made it, so who I should attribute it to, but we spotted it on Strange Maps.

There are many interesting things to note about it and of course I'm going to start with Australia.  We'd have to all move to Spain, which is the 51st largest country to go with our 51st greatest population.  Of all the re-locations we'd have the greatest distance to travel, it's almost all the way across the globe!  But at least when we got there we'd have decent weather and a few good beaches still.  The Spanish would have been moved out to Ethiopia, now neighboured by the Japanese in Sudan.  And all of Pakistan would have moved to Australia.

At the top of the scale, Russia would be overtaken by the Chinese and its own population would be pushed into Kazakhstan.  It's still big, but it's landlocked, so a bit of a come down for Russia's powers.  Indonesians will need to move into the space formerly known as China and India would move into Canada, which represents maybe the largest climate adjustment on the scale, along with the Swiss who will be moved to Bangladesh and the Vietnamese who will have to move to Greenland!  

South Korea might think they could escape their northern ex-countryman by moving to South Africa, but in purely comic form, North Korea follows them, staying to the north in what would have been Botswana. The populations of Poland, Iraq, Chile and Algeria will be their new neighbours.  Italy's down there as well now.  

If you're wondering what fate awaits the American people it's quite surprising: they don't move anywhere.  And neither does the population of Brazil or the people of Yemen or Ireland.

Obviously this re-location can't be debated in too political a way as there's no mention of how many people the wealth of each country could support, but it can still get heated...  

A Map Mapping Maps

To celebrate the fifth birthday of the google Maps API on the 29th of June, Kier Clarke, the map loving soul behind Google Maps Mania, has built Google Maps a map, mapping maps, apps., mashups and sites that use their API.  He's called it Mappy Birthday.

Zeroing in on Australia there are quite a few interesting offerings, but there's one that stands out in particular.  It's called Black Saturday and it was made by the ABC, about the bush fires that savaged Victoria in February 2008.  They've mashed up their own footage, both video and audio, with images, reports and more footage submitted by people whose lives were touched by the lick of flames. 

Someone is bound to make a film or TV drama about it, if they haven't already, but this site is far deeper way to learn about what happened because it's interactive.

A Question of Spot Sport

It's a sporty time of year, but there's one sporting event that is particularly interesting as far as mapping is concerned, and that's the Tour de France.  The World Cup and Wimbledon are non starters when it comes to making for interesting maps, but the Tour de France is perfect for the desk-chair sportsman in all of us. 

There are a couple of different offerings, including one from Ubilabs, but the best one to watch right at this moment is the one built for Team HTC Columbia on Google maps which allows you to watch nine riders from the team in real time. 

Including Mark Renshaw who heralds from Bathurst and Michael Rogers from Canberra.  And to really get you in the mood you can also see what speed they're travelling at and how much power they're expending... Don't knock it until you tried it, watching those little coloured dots cross the screen is quite exciting.  Go purple dot...

Now that your eyes are directed to that part of the globe it's a good opportunity to mention the upcoming launch of Nestoria France.  If you have any French you can test it out on the Nestoria France Blog, penned – or typed rather – by our suitably charming Frenchman, François Hérissé.

As seen from the air

There are some buildings that are just crying out to be made famous by GoogleMaps or GoogleEarth and this is one of them. Significantly less impressive looking from ground level this is the Holiday Inn, Jabiru, in Kakadu National Park... It's sort of a questionable joke seeing as a couple of tourists have been eaten by crocodiles while staying in the park in the last decade...

App. Comp. Update #2

NSW and Vic really do seem to be in competition, for no sooner did the Victorian Government announce the winners of their App. my State Competition, the NSW Government went ahead and announced the winners of their Apps4NSW contest. 

Without further chat here are the winners: and there are two main winners – first prize was shared between...

DemographicDrapes by Brad Spencer at NuMaps – which is an OpenLayers application using Google Maps in which various community census datasets, pollution ratings and other indicators can be layered over the map in different combinations, allowing users to really get under the skin of a postcode or administrative area. 

This is a map of relative mortgage stress in different areas of Sydney for example.

Start with the base map of your choice, which you can divide by postcode, suburb, local council or state electoral boundaries, and over that layer the dataset of your choice, from the median mortgage repayment or house prices, to the average ages...

This map shows the dominant age groups in some of Melbourne's suburbs.

...and the average number of people living in each dwelling.

This map shows the density of people living in Adelaide's homes.

You can zoom quickly to an address, which means it's a fairly useful tool for people using Nestoria, and you can also add your own points or refine the way to drapes are reported.

Suburban Trends by Smartmashups – this mashup has already been mentioned on this blog because it won the MashupAustralia competition, but to recap it's another app. that provides users with information about different suburbs. In this instance there aren't as many comparisons you can make, but the interface is much easier to use.  Suburbs are ranked by colour, comparing census results on Economic Index - both nationally and state by state, Education Levels, Socio-economic Advantage and perceived safety travelling on public transport and on foot. 

Here's a comparison of the Socio-Economic Indexes of some Canberran suburbs:

And here's Subiaco Perth with the relative safety-o-meter included:

Both these apps would be useful to house hunters, depending on the level of detail they're looking for when researching a particular area.  Second prize goes to the Bike Community Hub, which mashes up information relevant to bikers and allows you to add your own hazard spots and recommended routes – which may of may not be a relevant house hunting tool, and third prize went to The School Hall which allows you to put Australian High Schools head to head based on student to teacher ratios, socio-economic status and results. 

Heads up to recent interviewee Alan Jones - whose dream app. or site would help him work out his tax -' cause  someone has made one for you.  It's called Tax App and is supposed to be able to help you work out your tax liability using only your iphone.  At the moment it only works for Stamp Duty, but Anthony W. Wardley, its creator, has plans to add other taxes.  House hunters may want to use this one as well, by entering their state and the cost of the property they're considering they can work out the stamp duty, then use a loan calculator to work out their borrowing requirements.  

Attention Australian Governments

Australian Governments: this is what could happen if you freed up geospatial data relating to public transport:

Not that Australia will turn into London, that people will be able to make things like this: a real time moving map of the London underground. You'll have to click though to get the full effect, but imagine that all those yellow markers are moving trains and you'll get the idea.
There's one available for Britain's National Rail Network, only it's not quite as live – it's more a mathematical study involving trains running to their scheduled times...  Thanks very much to Matthew Somerville who put it together on Science Hackday last weekend using the recently released TfL (Transport for London) api. 

Are we there yet?

Have you ever wondered how many lengths of an Olympic Swimming pool you'd have to swim to get between Sydney and Melbourne? 

14443.2 pools
Or how many parsecs it is between Alice Springs and Brisbane?
6.36554e-11 pc 

Or how many furlongs between Perth and Darwin?
13195.8 furlongs 

Do you want to know how you can answer questions such as these of your own accord?  One of the latest things to appear on Google Map Labs is the Distance Measurement Tool, which will tell you the distance between points as the crow flies or as you plot them.  And as well as telling you the distance in kilometres, or if you're American, or learned to drive before 1966, in miles, it also has an I feel geeky option that will translate the distance into all sorts of wacky or historic units of measurement.