Mapping & Mashing

Before today I had no idea who first mapped Canada. Because I was a gigantic 5 '3' at twelve-years-old (the same height as I am now), I suspect my grade 7 teacher / coach wanted me to save my mind for my basketball career.

WHO FIRST MAPPED CANADA?
Governor Buade de Frontenac appointed Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin as Canada's first cartographer in 1674. ( I would've guessed Jacques Cartier) Franquelin produced 50 maps of France's Canadian territory and none were published. Map publishing was not established until the 1820's.

TODAY'S MAPPING:
The good people of the internets are pumped for the geoweb. At this year's Maker Faire an enthusiastic builder spoke to my partner and I about how we could create a remote control plane with GPS and aerial photo capabilities using only an old cellphone. His name was Chris Anderson, he was and still is the editor-in-chief for Wired magazine, and he was about as giddy as a school girl.

Wired remains ecstatic for mapping projects and even published an extensive article this month entitled, " Google Maps is Changing the Way We See the World" outlining the history of online mapping. In the last few months, in addition to the buzz around Google's Street View, bloggers and programmers have begun publishing links to Google Map mash-up tools and even mapping mash-up tools like Flash Earth. (an amalgamation of aerial photography from NASA, Google, Windows and Ask)

AND BEYOND:
This morning Astrophysicists at Oxford University launched "Galaxy Zoo", a project that calls upon the general public to take part in mapping one million galaxies simply by categorizing shapes in the telescope photos from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The images include over 9,583 square degrees of the sky and 1.27 million types of stars, galaxies and quasars. Man, oh man, it's better than the planetarium's Pink Floyd laser lightshow. Jump on the project's band wagon by taking this tutorial, and flexing your Canada Arm.

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Mapping & Mashing

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