Cameron Booth has created a redesigned map of the US Interstate System.

Andy Woodruff at Cartogrammar has created a series of maps that use Flickr as a paintbrush.

Architect Emily Fischer has created a series of quilts that map out cities and neighborhoods.

After a decade of research, The Wildlife Conservation Society has put together “The Mannahatta Project” which provides an in-depth look at the island of Manhattan as it was circa 1609.

Goollery is an unofficial online gallery of interesting projects that are based on Google tools, API’s and the Google brand…

To make planning your next trip across the city a little smoother, Google Maps has implemented live traffic information for arterial roads. The service uses GPS enabled smart phones with the Google Maps application to crowdsource its data. With many devices telling HQ how fast they are traveling, a fairly accurate picture of where congestion is or isn’t can be presented. The ability to view traffic history also makes it easier to predict future conditions.
Tools like this make life easier, but there are concerns that if large numbers of drivers all try to optimize their route at once, even [...]

Founded on the belief that fruit should be a commonly shared resource, art project Fallen Fruit began with the idea to map all the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles and other American cities (see maps here). But since that time, the project — created by David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young — has expanded beyond its initial scope to include planning fruit parks in areas that lack such natural resources, and other multidisciplinary initiatives.
For example, back in 2006, the group participated in Civic Matters, a two-week residency project at Los Angeles Contemporary [...]

Exactly 40 years after Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, Google Earth launched the 5.0 version of their software containing an interactive 3-D atlas of the Moon.

Mapumental is a web service (currently in private beta) that helps London commuters take some of the guess-work out of deciding where to live, based on how long of a commute they’d like to deal with. Combining data from the UK’s various public transportation services, Mapumental can highlight the boundaries of potential towns you may want to live in based on the exact amount of time you want to spend traveling to work everyday: 30 minutes, 1 hour and so on.
Other details can be brought into the mix as well. The program also can take into account how much you [...]

Radical Cartography has made a compelling infographic displaying the different paths of the urban mass transit systems of North America.
[via Wehr in the World]

In a similar fashion to The Printed Blog, The Incidental was a printed guide to the Milan Furniture Fair that gathered its content from the web. Using a combination of user-submitted and pre-made content, The Incidental acted as a morphing snapshot of what was good to to see and do. Running updates were sent in via Flickr, Twitter, Upcoming, text messages, email and even hand-written notes. These highlights and comments were then used to compile the updated map and guide for the next day. 5,000 copies were printed up daily, and delivered by a team of bike messengers to to [...]

Using 35 million geotagged photographs from Flickr, David Crandall and a team from Cornell University have created accurate global and city maps from the data alone. Plotting the raw data from the photos (geotags, text descriptions, key visual features) onto a blank canvas revealed the planet’s familiar landscape, as well as  where in the world people were placing their attention. They also discovered some interesting facts from the experiment, such as: New York is the world’s most photographed city (12 million images), and the midtown Apple Store is the fifth most photographed location in the city.
[New Scientist via The Morning [...]

As part of the “Piece Together for Peace” project, Japanese graphic designer Kentaro Nagai has recombined the land masses of a single world map to create the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac.
Rooster

Rat

Check out the other designs below and an impressive, animated version of all twelve designs here.
[via Pink Tentacle]

PSFK got the chance to visit the new Google Maps powered New York City information center this weekend, and overall it’s a very cool experience. The space has a clean, minimalist feel. It’s a kind of spaceship-modern, mostly white interior interspersed with neat rows of brochures and colorful glowing screens, which come to life with when touched.
The big attraction here are the huge gesture recognition touch screen tables, designed by Local Projects. Guests can use the kiosks to navigate New York City, and create a custom itinerary for their visit. To start the process, users place a disk, (which has [...]

Google has added an easy to use public transportation layer called Google Transit to its map application. Over 50 world city maps now include a handy way to plan car-free trips. Although Google maps will already list the locations and schedules of public transportation options where available, this new tool allows users to get a holistic picture of an area’s transportation map and figure out routes when they don’t come up in a search.
[Google Lat Long Blog via Treehugger]