Wired Big Ideas for 2011: Chatitecture – Talking Buildings

We are pleased to say that in at number 24 of Wired Magazines ‘Big Ideas for 2011’ is Chatitecture, part of the Tales of Things project. Over the past 8 months a group of us have been developing technology to allow buildings to ‘talk’, to communicate their history, their architecture and the stories of people passing through.

Its simple to do, just sign up with Tales of Things, upload a image of your building of choice (under 2mb) and add a story. Your building will then go live and your be able to add it to the architecture group. If you want you can also print out a QRCode that you can stick to the building allowing anyone to scan the code and add to the story/history of the building via the free iPhone/Android apps.


Your building will also be able to ‘Tweet’ everytime it is scanned or a new comment/story added, it will also become part of the ‘World of Things’ map – a place to view all the objects added so far to the site.


The project team are working on ways to make the objects more location aware and aware of near by objects, it could be interesting over the next few months to see how this develops.


You can start tagging anything and everything via talesofthings.com


Map Books of 2010

Map books of 2010

Once again, to help with your gift shopping, I’ve compiled a list of noteworthy books about maps that were published in 2010. There are 10 books on the list this year: they include new atlases, web mapping manuals, a history of the Ordnance Survey, curated collections of maps, and scholarly studies of the use and power of maps.

The list can be found in three places: here for Canada, here for the U.K., and here for the U.S. — choose the one that best suits your location. Sales from these pages generate affiliate revenue for this blog; you may have noticed that I’ve started adding Amazon referral links for their Canadian and U.K. operations, which is why everything is now in triplicate.

As was the case last year, I haven’t seen all of these books, but I’ve reviewed two of them so far and am likely to review two more.

Some books didn’t make this list through no fault of their own: GIS manuals are too specialized for a mainstream audience (I almost didn’t include the OSM manuals and Map Scripting 101 for the same reason, but figured that web mapping was of interest beyond the geospatial industry), and a new edition of Oxford’s Atlas of the World — now in its 17th edition (Canada, U.K.) — is an annual affair. And one significant wrinkle: Rachel Hewitt’s Map of a Nation, her history of the Ordnance Survey, isn’t available in the U.S. or Canada.

Previously: Map Books of 2009.

Map Books of 2010 first appeared on The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps on November 24, 2010. Copyright