• Recaps of the Esri UC: GISUser’s Top 10 New Features at 10.2, VerySpatial Esri User’s Conference Live Blog.
• Penn State’s mapping MOOC (massive open online course) got a lot of press this week. Learn more about it here.
• Orange County used to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for their parcel data. No longer. Read about this week’s California high court ruling on Wired.
• A new e-book, Python Geospatial Development Second Edition by Erik Westra was published this month.
• GISLounge just posted a nice little article on the mapping of Antarctica’s bedrock. As a natural resources scientist I find the article and information fascinating. You all knew that I am a natural resources scientist, I’m sure*.

• If you didn’t read The Economist this week then you missed out on a great two page article on infographics titled “Winds of change” and—you guessed it—featuring the Viégas and Wattenberg Wind Map as well as new books by Nathan Yau (@flowingdata), Simon Rogers, and James Ball and Valentine D’Efilippo. Near the end of the article we have admonitions not to let graphics obscure information and not to create “visual gibberish”. If you didn’t read it in print, not to worry, you can read the article here.

• The Esri UC was a great conference. My most popular tweet for the week wound up being “Maps reveal patterns that would otherwise be concealed.”– James Fallows #esriuc. I didn’t set out to tweet the plenary events but occasionally there was a quote that I just had to tweet. Will.i.am and the Roosevelt High School students were the surprise hit, captivating the audience. Speaking of the audience, have you ever been in a room with 10,000+ chairs?

I picked up one of the Globe People at the Esri store to help out @Ladyofthestars. Her aim is to get pictures of it all around the world, from people who will post them on twitter and elsewhere with the #globeman hashtag. Hopefully this pic, taken as I was leaving the San Diego airport yesterday, helps the cause:

Speaking of the Esri store, it was great to see my two favorite cartography books on display…

• In other news, I was in my first running race of any kind and attended my first ever professional sporting event. Never mind that I was slow in the former and had no idea what was going on in the latter, but just as in mapping, you have to start somewhere…

Mapsport Cartographic has put together a comprehensive review of Cartographer’s Toolkit here. If you need more information about the book, this is one of the best explanations of what it’s all about that I’ve seen yet.

I never use Twitter Advertising but yesterday I was reading about how you can see analytics for your tweets via the Twitter Advertising platform even if you’re not an advertiser* so I tried it out this morning. If you’re a Twitter user I highly recommend checking out your feed stats this way, it was easy just to log in with your usual credentials and view your best tweets.

Here’s what the analytics show for my feed for the last 6 months in terms of what they categorize as “Best” tweets. Interestingly it isn’t the tweets with the most clicks. Instead, it’s the tweets with the most favorites, retweets, and replies. I was amused to see the tweet about the 400 page projection book getting such a high rank. I just never guessed that many people would have such an interest in projections!

*U.S. only

This month marks the third anniversary of the blog. Thanks so much to all the readers, the commenters, the people who email me with ideas and questions, and all the great cartographers who’s work featured in the blog provides an enormous amount of inspiration for everyone.

The very first post was Top Five Cartography Workflow Options.

Cheers!

Via Frank Jacobs, Strange Maps Blog, bigthink.com