Saturday, June 9, 2007

Travel maps

There are a number of sites out there which let you produce maps showing where you've traveled, that you can imbed on web sites, blogs, online profiles, etc. I just came across travbuddy, who have a nice little flash-based widget which you can use to show which countries (and US states) you have been to. Of course on their discussion board the Canadians are upset that you can show US states but not Canadian provinces, and the Welsh are upset that they get lumped in with the rest of the UK, and Grand Cayman which I checked in my list is too small to appear - welcome to the politics of map-making! But I like its simplicity, its interactivity and its friendly not-quite-cartographic look.









Click here for a larger version.

Many sites will only let you put a restricted subset of HTML in profiles etc - so for example you can't use the map above in a flickr profile. Douwe Osinga has a clever approach which can be used in this situation - he manipulates the palette of a gif image on the fly, and so just requires an image to be imbedded which most sites will allow.


create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

He has a visited states map for the US too:


create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I find travel maps equally interesting, yet I prefer the traditional ones than online ones. I find them to be more accurate. Like when I was looking for self catering berlin.