StrangeMaps: The little blog that could
If eyeballs are the currency traded in that great niche market — the blogosphere — then count the StrangeMaps blogger a wealthy man. Or woman.
StrangeMaps was created not quite a year ago as a showcase for unusual cartography — the kind you don’t necessarily find in a typical library atlas or in the travel section down at Barnes & Noble. As the blogger says:
Maps that are ‘different,’ or that tell a story.
And for 130 posts spread over nine months, the little cartography blog percolated along, gathering a small but appreciative band of regular visitors.
The breads of France. Posted March 27.
—
Europe as a queen. Posted July 6.
—
By March, the blogger noticed his web counter had surpassed 500,000 hits. He gratefully posted:
That’s way more than I imagined for a blog merely intended to be a storage room for some strange maps I like.
By the start of June, the count surpassed a million. Clearly, StrangeMaps had found a following.
Then came June 10.
On that day, the StrangeMaps blogger posted one particular map — yes, a strange one — in which various states of the U.S. are labeled for countries in which the Gross Domestic Product is roughly similar to that state.
Strange, of course. But also compelling. Evidently.
On just one day — June 12 — StrangeMaps received more than 160,000 hits.
You can guess what happened. Yep: Someone had posted a link to the strange GDP map at Fark.com:
By July 10, the hit counter had soared past two million. The blogger blogged:
At this rate of acceleration, strangemaps will hits its third million within a week. And will be up to a gazillion come September 10 this year.
Well, maybe not.
It’s a stunning lesson in which a little niche blog can do if it catches fire. All it takes is one “Hey, Martha” moment and your url is passed along faster than a Hillary Clinton web rumor.
And if you happen to have good content to educate or amuse all the viral thrillseekers who surf your way… well, that can be your ticket to the online big-time.
Welcome to new media.
That GDP map was when we discovered him, too. You might recall the post — yes, posted on June 12:
http://www.visualeditors.com/apple/2007/06/now-thats-one-strange-map/
Since then, we’ve become big fans. We’ve noted StrangeMaps a couple of times here in the blog. You may have seen StrangeMaps cited last week in SportsDesigner, too, for this honey:
Baseball team terrorities in the U.S., apparently from a Niketown store in San Francisco.
—
Because of the quality of StrangeMaps content and commentary and because you, the target audience of this blog, deal with maps and infographics every day, we thought it might be a good idea to pick the brain of the StrangeMaps blogger. He — or she — was kind enough to answer a few questions via e-mail:
Q. Why do you have this huge interest in maps? Are you a cartographer? What is your background?
A. To explain the why of it is perhaps the hardest question about any infatuation. But I can come up with this circumstantial answer: I’ve always loved maps, and some of the earliest memories of reading I have are of me ploughing through an atlas from cover to cover, as if it were a ‘proper’ book, engrossed in the bizarre shapes of countries and continents – and sad when I reached the index section. Atlases, if approached with an impressionable mind, can serve as road maps for the imagination.
—
A tourist tries to decipher an unhelpful French road sign map. Posted July 11.
—You would think that with such an obsession for maps, I’d be in some job that is cartography-related. But that’s only marginally true. I do write for a living, but on a wide range of subjects – and only sometimes get to write on maps.
Q. “Strange” maps is certainly an interesting niche. How on earth do you come up with material for posts?
Since putting up an e-mail address on the blog a few months ago, I’ve received literally hundreds of map suggestions. Most of them are worthy of consideration, so that’s an interesting source right there.
But I consciously avoid only using those maps since half the fun of the blog for me is finding maps myself. Some of them I dig up in my own library (which by now contains quite a few atlases and map-related books), but most of them I find online, either by randomly googling map-related search terms of by working my way through online map collections. The nicest finds are the ones when you weren’t looking or didn’t expect to find anything. After more than 150 maps posted, those finds are getting rarer, however.
Q. Your page mentions you have more than 2 million hits. That’s in less than a year. Some bloggers — and some mainstream media sites — would die for those kind of numbers. Are you surprised with this success?
A. Completely surprised!
When I started the blog in September of last year, I knew that most of the millions of blogs out there hardly get any visitors at all and I fully expected to fall into that category. Strangemaps was in fact only meant to be a collection of cartographic curiosa that, while not private, would be so idiosyncratic as to mainly interest myself. I can only surmise that the internet in general and blogging in particular is an ideal way to cater for ‘niche’ subjects such as mine.
The golden rule for blogging might be: stay general, score minimal; to get the traffic, get specific.
Q. I can just imagine the sort of folks who might come across your blog: Rand McNally employees, NASA and National Weather Service professionals, journalists. What kind of feedback have you received?
A. I do get quite a lot of my response from people who are in some way or other working in cartography, geography, or related fields. It’s even happened a few times that I’ve posted a map, and afterwards was contacted by the artist or cartographer who made it ( e.g. the Bruceville and Hutt River Province maps). That feedback has been unfailingly kind and generous – considering that I’d posted those maps without their prior consent.
—
Australia’s Hutt River principality, which maintains its own Navy. Despite being landlocked. Posted June 3.
—
Bruceville — a.k.a. New Jersey — posted June 22.
—Most feedback has been of ‘regular’ readers, who just happen to love maps as much as I do. One great thing about strangemaps is that it’s brought into focus for me how cartophilia (if that’s what one could call it) is not at all the isolated affliction I thought it was when I was that kid leafing through all those atlases.
Q. Why do you remain anonymous in your blog?
A. I prefer to stay anonymous in order to avoid accusations of political, cultural, geographic or any other bias. This way, the focus is on the maps themselves. Additionally, this anonymity thing is kind of fun and exciting too.
Q. Do you see opportunity to parlay your site into something more? A book, perhaps?
A. I’ve been thinking about making a ‘blook’ out of the blog for some time now, but the nature of the subject makes that quite difficult: many maps are under copyright. In theory, the copyright-holders could demand that I take down their maps but in practice, since the blog is non-profit, most people are happy to have their work included. That will change if and when I make that book.
I have started to inquire about the issue, though. A friend of mine happens to be a copyright lawyer. He pointed out that the picture accompanying the post about the girl who tattooed the Hannover city map on her back could have three copyright holders: the photographer, the tattoo artist and the girl herself. And that’s just one image…
Hannover, Germany, posted June 3.
—Q. What do you think about newspaper maps? Do you find them relatively well-done? Or are they mostly dreck?
A. Mostly dreck! But some of them are well done and imaginative, in fact, some of the maps on strangemaps are newspaper material. For example the GDP map of the US (not the map used in the original post, but the one in the follow-up post).
This version of the GDP map ran in the Toronto Globe & Mail in 2005. Posted July 6.
—Q. Are there, perhaps, particular types of errors you find more commonly in newspaper maps? What might you suggest newspaper mapmakers do to improve their craft?
A. I guess the only type of error common to newspaper maps is that they’re made under deadline pressure and thus more bound to contain stupid oversight errors. The only suggestion I can make also goes for the journalists themselves: re-read your stuff thoroughly before you go to print!
And there you have it. How to achive blogging success.
Find — and bookmark — the StrangeMaps blog here:
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/
Read the original StrangeMaps post about the GDP map here:
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/06/10/131-us-states-renamed-for-countries-with-similar-gdps/
Read a follow-up post, in which the history of the GDP map is traced to a 2005 graphic from the Toronto Globe & Mail: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/07/06/135-update-on-the-gdp-map-of-the-usa/
Read about that baseball map here:
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/08/03/160-the-united-countries-of-baseball/#comments
Read comments about the GDP map that were posted at Fark:
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2861403
