Slashgeo

The Cartography blog links to maps of the human footprint from the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. From the blog: "The Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment has put together a series of maps showing the effects humans are having on the landscape of the world. Data sets include population, land area, cropland area, major crops and land suitability. [...] The resolution is not the finest (0.5 degrees)."

konquest writes "The BBC proposes a nice interactive map of the population growth all over the globe. Complete with explainations, this map is more than just a pretty map: it's instructive and pretty well done!"

The Very Spatial blog links to a newly launched electoral geography website. From the VS entry: "There’s a LOT of good data there for anyone doing anything with elections around the world. They seem to be following a “beg, borrow, or steal” philosophy as far as the data (which I wholly support!), so you might have to do a little massaging to get into a form you can easily use for analysis."

Very Spatial and other blogs links to interactive maps about campaign contributions for the U.S. 2008 election [warning, it seems the maps don't work with Firefox]. From this article (including screenshots): "Being the FEC, the map is also not without bureaucratic guidelines. It only includes itemized individual contributions; PAC money or donations under $200 are not reported; and primary and general funds are not separated. Also, money transferred from cong. to WH accounts will be attributed to the state where the cong. cmte was registered -- So, all the “SEN” money that HRC raised from 22101 or 90210 is recorded as contributions out of NY State." See related stories below.

Virgil Zetterlind writes "TakItWithMe is a new service for uploading Google My Maps and Google Earth KML directly to GPS using the recently announced Garmin Communicator. A full description and demo video are posted at http://earthnc.com/introducing-takitwithme . TakItWithMe also offers My Maps and KML conversion to GPX." Several blogs have discussed this new offer. Ogle Earth shared: "The upshot: Annotate with Google MyMaps when exploring a future adventure — then easily upload those points to your GPS device and have them handy while in the field."

We covered electoral maps quite a few times in the past. The official Google LatLong blog discuss the mapping of where U.S. congressional provisions (or earmarks) are directing funds and links to a USA Today article. The Map Room links to an interactive map of the results of the recent Swiss federal election and links to a new U.S.-oriented site named The Electoral Map. Below I copied some of the previous stories related to elections, including this one on worldwide electoral geography website.

Arno Scharl writes "The ECOresearch Network has just released a geotagged news archive on the US Presidential Election 2008. The system gathers and annotates documents from blogs, environmental organizations, the Fortune 1000 and news media from the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand. Processing these sites yields more than 800,000 documents each week. The tightly coupled interface integrates geographic maps with information landscapes, ontology graphs and tag clouds to reveal both geographical and semantic relationships. Each visualization is implemented as a Web Map Service and displayed via OpenLayers. A 6-minute screencast demonstrates the major components. Besides geotagging the documents, the system provides weekly statistics on the US Election 2008. It identifies (i) attention by counting references to a candidate, (ii) sentiment towards a candidate by looking for co-occurring positive and negative expressions, (iii) keywords reflecting the most important topics associated with a candidate." See below other US elections 2008 stories.

From the GIS Development web site : "As the US presidential election season begins, the coming year promises a series of primaries, caucuses and straw polls, culminating in a general election in November. GIS and software development company to help geographically record, map, and analyze election day incidents in real-time, for the first time in the 103 years of Committee of Seventy. The primary challenge of incorporating GIS into this endeavor was to create a system that would enable both quick recording of incidents and real-time map generation." For the entire article see this web site : http://www.gisdevelopment.net/news/viewn.asp?id=GIS:N_wbpqhleozg