The Map Room now has, for some reason, a Bluesky account. I haven’t seen much in the way of cartographic activity on that platform, but maybe the massive onslaught of followers that will inevitably result from this post will change that.
Category: Housekeeping
Site Updates and Upgrades
More than two dozen book listings have just been added to the Map Books of 2024 page. I’ve also been making some long overdue tweaks to the design and functionality of the site, including switching to WordPress’s Gutenberg editor at long last (which has, unsurprisingly, involved some glitches and hiccups). Also, the Tumblr mirror has been retired; see the Subscribe and Follow page for other ways to receive new updates.
Help The Map Room Go Ad-Free
Earlier this year my ad revenue increased nearly tenfold. This obviously led me to conclude that it’s probably time to stop relying on ad revenue, and try moving to a model based on reader support. If you’d like to understand how I came to that contradictory conclusion, read on; otherwise the tl;dr is that you can now support The Map Room via monthly payments at both Ko-fi and Patreon. When monthly payments reach a certain level (see below), I will discontinue ads on this site.
Continue reading “Help The Map Room Go Ad-Free”The Map Books of 2024 page is now live; I managed to get an early start on it this year. There aren’t many books listed so far, because it’s early, and books in this category typically get published in the second half of the year. But you can help me fill in the blanks. If you know about a book coming out some time this year that’s on a map-related subject, please let me know. Ideally, the book is in the publisher’s catalogue and has at least a tentative publication date, but I’ll work with what I can get; I basically just need something to link to.
Updated the Map Books of 2023 page last week with some titles I hadn’t previously known about. I try to make this list as comprehensive as possible, so if I’ve missed something, let me know.
The Map Books of 2023 page is finally live. I typically have it up closer to the start of the year, but this hasn’t been a typical year, so it’s taken a while to get to. As always, please let me know if you know of a book that came out or is coming out this year—anything to do with cartography, maps or a related subject—that ought to be listed on this page; I’ll need a publication date and something to link to.
Twenty Years
Today is The Map Room’s 20th anniversary.
The rule of thumb is that an item is vintage if it’s more than 40 years old, and antique if it’s more than 100 years old. (That tan-coloured Replogle globe with South Sudan on it? Not antique.) Time runs faster on the web, though: something 20 years old feels geologically ancient. Running a 20-year-old blog in 2023 feels like keeping a pet coelacanth: you’re keeping a living fossil alive.
As social media approaches what may well be its extinction event, there’s been a lot of talk about “bringing back blogs.” Um, blogs never went away: Kottke.org just marked its 25th anniversary, and there are still plenty of websites out there powered by WordPress or something similar that don’t call themselves blogs. What faded away, I think, was the idea of, and self-identification as, a blogger. Lots of people started blogs in the format’s early years but didn’t keep up with them; social media was a better fit for what they wanted to do. Not many people start a blog qua blog to be a blogger nowadays. But institutions still post updates in blog form, and experts share their insights on platforms that blur the lines between blog, social media and newsletter.
(Certainly the map blog never went away: we still have general-interest blogs like Maps Mania and Lat × Long; industry and academic figures like Matthew Edney, Kenneth Field and James Killick regularly post commentary and links; and plenty of working cartographers share their latest creations on blogging platforms as well.1)
The Map Room is not an institution, nor am I an expert. No really: I’m not. The idea that someone with an intense interest in a subject but not much knowledge could start a blog as a way to explore the subject—“an exercise in self-education” is what I called it—was something that made sense in 2003. It might be a bit more archaic now.2 I am also, twenty years on, rather more self-educated: I understand what I’m linking to more than I used to, and I’ve seen enough to know when to be skeptical. I’ve called bullshit on more than one occasion. I still can’t make a map of my own (there’s an alternate universe in which I’m making a perfectly happy living as a freelance cartographer), but my appreciation for them is all the richer for having spent two decades at this.
State of The Map Room
- Assume I’m no longer on Twitter. While my account is still there, and I check in very occasionally, it’s very much in read-only mode to catch things I might otherwise miss. The account is locked and I stopped posting to it in December. While I still cross-post to the Facebook page and Tumblr, the best place to follow me on social media is on Mastodon.
- Back to blogs. My blogroll page is always (a) out of date and (b) a mess, and needs keeping up to date (and cleaning up). If you have (or know of) a blog that should be listed, drop me a line.
- That goes for podcasts too. I’m only aware of a few of them. Podcasts: links: send them to me.
- Old posts going offline soon. To keep my hosting costs under control, I have to more or less break the old, Movable Type-based archives. These are posts made between January 2004 and June 2011. (They’re running on a different hosting plan, I unwisely coded them with hard server links, moving servers breaks those links, and I can’t edit the templates directly any more, not in Movable Type anyway.) These posts don’t get a lot of page views any more and I assume most have dead links; even so, a lot of them are worth keeping, so at some point I will be moving at least some of them into the current system. There are 4,004 posts involved so this will be a time-consuming task, and I’ll be doing it in chunks. In the meantime I’ll put up a placeholder page.
- I really need to find a better design template for this site.
A Mastodon Update
The Map Room’s Mastodon presence has moved to @maproomblog@mapstodon.space. It just seemed more sensible to be on an instance that focused on the mapping and geospatial community. (By the way, mapstodon.space’s admin has a Patreon to cover the hosting costs: running a Mastodon instance is rather more expensive than running a website.)
Previously: Mastodon for Mappers; The Map Room on Mastodon.
The Map Room on Mastodon
Given what’s been going on with Twitter recently, I figure that a Mastodon account for The Map Room might be useful, at least for those who feel the need to jump from Twitter to Mastodon. You can find it here: @maproomblog@mastodon.social Update Nov. 20: I’ve moved it to maproomblog@mapstodon.space.
I have no plans to shut down any of The Map Room’s other social media presences (Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter)—not at this time, anyway. And you can always subscribe via RSS or email—no intermediating platform required.
I’ve just added quite a few more titles to the Map Books of 2022 page, which lists all the map, cartography and geospatial related books scheduled to be published this calendar year. I try to keep this page as comprehensive and as up-to-date as possible, so please let me know if there’s something I should add to the list.
Nineteen
In other news, today is The Map Room’s 19th anniversary.
It hasn’t been a continuous run: it was on hiatus between June 2011 and January 2016 (the map content I posted to my personal blog during that time has since been brought over). But still, it’s been a lot: approaching something like 6,200 blog posts as of this writing. It’s kind of staggering, in hindsight.
If you’re moved to support The Map Room financially, you can do so via Ko-Fi or my hosting provider. It’s very much appreciated, and will help keep things going.
The Map Books of 2022 page is now live. At the moment only a few books are listed—it’s only February, after all—but this is where my worldly and erudite readers come in. If you know of a book coming out this year that ought to be on this page—basically, any and all books about cartography, maps and related subjects—please let me know. It’s best if the book has a publisher listing and publication date (though I’m well aware that dates can move around a lot); I’ll work with what I can get, though.
Map Book List Updates
One last update to the Map Books of 2021 page, thanks to a couple of titles in Esri Press’s gift guide that I’d previously overlooked.
Meanwhile, for even more titles, see Matthew Edney’s Map History Books of 2021.
Subscribe to the New Email Digest
Last April I told you that with Feedburner’s announcement that it would be ending email subscriptions, I would have to come up with an alternative solution for the 500 or so of you who subscribe to The Map Room via its email digest. That alternative is now (more or less) up and running: You can subscribe to the new weekly digest by entering your email on the form on this page. You will receive an automated email asking you to verify that description. Click on that email’s link and you’ll be subscribed.
From now on, email subscriptions to The Map Room will involve a summary of the week’s posts written by me, rather than an auto-post of recent blog entries. If all goes to plan, it will mostly come out on Fridays (if I’ve posted that week), plus there may be occasional announcements at other times.
In the end I decided to go with my own internet service provider’s announcement list tool. It’s very old school and a bit less easy to use than a third-party email marketing service, but far better, I think, on the privacy front. I don’t even ask for your name. Your subscription is between you, me, and my mail server.
Current subscribers were emailed on Wednesday about this change and invited to subscribe. I got a lot of bounced addresses, so it may be that some of you reading this via email did not get Wednesday’s messages. Note that the Feedburner-powered digest will be shut down after this post goes out; if you want to continue (or start) receiving posts by email, visit this page to subscribe to the weekly digest.
(Let me know if you encounter any problems. I’ve gotten reports that people aren’t getting their confirmation messages, so do check your spam folder.)