Today we’re pleased to show off a pet project that’s been occupying us off and on for nearly two years. After some emotional separation issues, we are declaring finished a few typographic map posters—one of Boston, and color and black and white flavors of Chicago. Everything in these maps is made of type.

These look good hanging on a wall, so of course prints are available. Check out the page we’ve set up with some more detailed images and links to get copies for yourself.

I began this project with the Boston map, thinking it would be fun to expand the style of my small party announcement map to a full city. The idea caught on here at Axis Maps and soon Mark and Ben had parallel effort underway for a map of Chicago, a city to which several Axis Mappers have some affinity. Ben took the lead on that map, and some twenty months later we both added our respective finishing touches and reluctantly let go.

There was nothing automated about making these maps, unless you count copying and pasting. Everything was laid out manually, from tracing streets over an OpenStreetMap image, to nudging curved water text, to selectively erasing text to create a woven street pattern. The Boston and Chicago maps differ in style, but the end result is similar: from a distance it can appear as an accurate reference map, and as you get closer you notice the thousands of words it comprises.

This has been a fun, if long, process, and we hope other people can enjoy these maps as much as we have. There are only two cities for now, but look for more in the future! Our list right now is San Francisco, New York (Manhattan), and Washington, D.C.

Last week on 9/23, there were major disruptions to the Places listings in Google Maps with numerous reports of listings not showing, showing the wrong Place, duplicate listings and the QR codes not working. One theory posited on the disruption was that Google was moving Maps to new servers. At the time, Google noted the problems and stated that they had been fixed. Many of the issues did disappear but it appears that there are still problems with the QR Codes not working and returning 404 Errors.

Here is my QR Code from my Dashboard. When scanned it currently directs a user to a 404 Error.

It is an interesting coincindence that in the Online Media Daily today, they are reporting out a 700% increase in Barcode scanning this year noting that “there were more barcode scans performed in a single month starting in July than in all of 2009″. The article went on to note that linking to a web site was by far the most common type of action used by a 2D (ie QR type) code with 85% of them going to a URL . From the report:

Looking at user demographics, the study found that half of barcode users are ages 35 to 45 and skew male, reflecting the smartphone and early-adopter populations. Android was easily the most popular smartphone platform among barcode users, with 45% owning devices powered by Google mobile operating system. Second was BlackBerry (27%), followed by the iPhone (15%), Symbian (9%), Java (3%) and Windows Mobile (1%).

The reason for the Android skew is that the app is a default app on that platform.

Update: Barry Hunter helped me parse the bad URL:

http://maps.google.com/m/place?hl=en&georestrict=input_scrid:dddcfcf8a07&utm_medium=QR

and determine that the problem lies in that fact that this location is not functioning: http://maps.google.com/m/place

If you redo the URL with the /m/ removed, it will work:

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&georestrict=input_srcid:dddcfcf8a07af88d&&utm_medium=QR

It is not clear why Google’s /m/ which is their mobile page is not working and/or why it it is not being redirected.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just published their recent results of Online Product Research by American adults. The hghlights:

*58% of Americans now reporting that they perform online research concerning the products and services that they are considering purchasing.

*The number of those who do research about products on any given day has jumped from 15% of adults in September 2007 to 21% in September 2010

*24% of American adults say they have posted comments or reviews online about the product or services they buy,

The numbers confirm Greg Sterling’s long stated Research Online Buy Offline mantra. The number of adults reporting having done product reviews is somewhat surprising to me. Interestingly the reviewers are roughly equally split between men and women and across age groups with some tilt towards white, higher educated and higher income individuals as more likely to leave reviews.

While the research is specifically about product reviews, I think it not unreasonable to think that a similar trend will apply to business reviews.