Top global interactive maps
As a lover of maps, i’ve come across a plenty of insightful interactive global maps over the past few years. Some of them can help you make sense of urban environments and others are simply just beautiful to look at. Below are just a handful of the maps worth sharing.
1. Strava Global Heatmap
Possibly the worlds most viewed spatial visualisation. And for good reason. Data displayed on the Strava Global Heatmap is aggregated from their millions of users who use the app to track their running and bike riding activities. Gain immediate insights into where people bike, run or both. You can also compare the 2014 and 2015 global maps or check out the Metro Map, which allows you to delve a little deeper in to isolating commuter counts.
2. Cyberthreat Real-time Map
The Kapersky Cyberthreat is a stunning mind-bending journey into the unknown world of cyber security. Viewed as either a globe or flat plane (top right button panel), it can be a little difficult at first to work out what is actually going. Colours represent different types of cyber threats and lines between countries are presumably cross-border cyberattacks. Click on countries to see their ranking as the most attacked country. Also, if you leave the demo running (once again, top right button panel to switch off) you’ll be shot through a cyber attack portal and end up on the other side of the world.
3. The Geotaggers’ World Atlas
The Geotaggers’ World Atlas is Eric Fisher’s long-term project to discover the world’s most interesting places and the routes that people follow between them. For over 5 years Eric has been retrieving photo locations from the Flickr search API and drawing lines between them. Read his personal blog post about the map.
4. Global Weather Conditions
This mesmerising visualisation, created by Cameron Beccario, maps the Earths weather patterns in real-time (well, refreshed every three hours). There are a bunch of different modes and features that you can toggle on/off. View wind patterns, the movement of the oceans or the density of particulates in the atmosphere. Be careful, this one is a serious time bandit. You could look at this all day.
5. The Ship Map
The Ship Map is a narrated visualisation of global shipping movements in 2012 from around the world. Watch ships move across oceans like tiny ants. Press play and be taken on a guided journey through the 250 million data points with a range of visualisation. In one word…Fascinating.
Do you know of other impressive global visualisations worth sharing? Feel free to share. Thanks.
Anthony is the Founder and Managing Director of CrowdSpot.
