The Social Space Station

This is a guest post from a friend of mine - Bruce McLennan about neography (or social mapping). He is a geographic data specialist currently working for AgResearch where he thinks about maps, locations, topography, space and other stuff I don’t understand. He also takes photographs of the New Zealand landscape that are quite beautiful (see below) and is a heavy user of social networking sites that support photo sharing.

So take it away Bruce:

Came across a cool new word today: neogeography, which apart from sounding like something out of The Matrix is a term coined to describe the phenomenon of social mapping, or map mash-ups. But neogeography sounds more respectable, apparently. Although I suspect is only crusty old geographers and cartographers that feel this need.

It’s basically people mapping their personal experiences on top of online mapping apps like Google Maps, Google Earth, Yahoo! Local maps (used by flicker, but a very poor cousin to Google in terms of map content), MS Live Search Maps, NASA’s World Wind, etc etc etc.

For example, I use Bike Radar to draw my favourite mountain bike rides on top of a google maps interface. Once I’ve done that, others can search for and find the trails I’ve sketched, read the route descriptions – whether it’s a 2km cruise to the shops your granny could do, or a hard bastards 100k killer over the rock & pillar range. Actually it’s only 46km, but it feels like a hundred. And you get an elevation profile graph. It shows the up and down hill sections of the ride and you can work out gradients – if you’re a masochist. It also total elevation gained and descended over the length of the ride (I’ve got to peddle up how many vertical kilometres???). But I digress.

Supposedly Platial.com was the first site to coin the term neogeography, although it’s still mostly only used on that site. Basically it boils down to map blogging; that is, kind souls are using these sites to point you in the direction of wee gems that are worth looking up in your travels that you won’t find in any tourist brochure. There is also Tagzania whose raison d’etre is to ‘tag the planet’. National Geographic Magazine picked up on it and wrote an article – want to know where to get the best fried cheese sticks on Route 66? Er, no thanks but you can bet some neogeographer has “push-pinned” it just in case you ever do. Thanks.

But I was glad to discover that the best ham sandwiches to be found in NZ are to be had at the Mt John observatory café, on a hill top (that’ll be Mt John) near Tekapo. Well, I was sort of glad – four types of specially baked bread, a choice of four kinds of mustard and thick slabs of ham-off-the-bone does sound good; will check them out next time I’m passing by. The views are supposed to be outstanding, too. Hang on, I’ll take a look; yep, they sure are. Look for yourself.

I didn’t find that in a neogeography blog. It was in an in-flight magazine (one for the print media). Perhaps I should blog it – there, done! Guess that officially makes me a neogeographer. Whee.