News You Can Bruise for 2006 August 8

(3) Tue Aug 08 2006 22:24 Dada Maps:

In 1996 I cut up a road atlas and pasted it into an AAA map of southern California. Because the scales were different, a major highway in one part of the country would feed into a street on the LA detail of the road map. This was my Dada Road Map.

I got this map laminated, but I always thought my craftsmanship on it was rather shoddy, so I never hung it up. Recently I foisted it on Jake Berendes, who pretended to appreciate it.

But once I got it out of my head, a similar idea took its place. Google Maps has pregenerated static image tiles for maps at different scales, and it wouldn't be hard to write a program that tiled them together like Google Maps does, except not helpfully.

So I present Dada Maps, which uses tiles from all over the world to create a new evocative map every 5 minutes. It's what I wanted my earlier project to look like, and it's not subject to scarcity. Enjoy!

maps

Comments:

Posted by Kevan at Tue Aug 08 2006 23:01

Nice; focusing intently on random details to give them fake significance is always great. (I'm getting an "Avenue Richardson" in Montreal, right now.) The mix of languages is fun, too.

Your FAQ casually says to "pick tiles", for new cities - how do you get the URLs of these things? I was trying to do this the other day, to feed to my GPS device, but gave up.

Posted by Leonard at Tue Aug 08 2006 23:22

Image tiles are displayed as normal images in the web browser, smushed together. You can right-click on the Google Maps screen and view them. At least I can. They might have some Javascript voodoo to prevent this that my browser doesn't run.

Posted by Kevan at Tue Aug 08 2006 23:47

Voodoo indeed. It turns out that "Tools > Page Info" lets you browse all the Media files used by a page, though, in Firefox.