In der aktuellen ESRI-Kundenzeitschrift arcAKTUELL wird United Maps vorgestellt - PDF Seite 30/31:

"Detaillierte Karten für das Geoweb

Flächendeckend hochdetaillierte Karten für regionale und nationale Geoinformationssysteme, Planung, Logistik und Geschäftsprozessoptimierung"

Danke für die Ehre - das freut uns sehr!

As any journalist knows, news has to be about people - they either make it, or are affected by it. No people, no news.

An easy guess - on the first glance.

The more people, the more stories, the more attention.

Let's drill that deeper and to a more regional and local scale: regional newspapers have been following the same business model ever since. They act as a lens into a sharply defined region, simply put - their area of circulation. If something happens, the paper traditionally is the first to publish but rather not the first to know. Blogs take over and papers still make the news to be referenced broadly.

So in our view, the cartogram skews the perspective due to scale. Naturally more populated areas produce more news (aka stories aka attention) but neccessarily that doesn't mean that less populated areas have less news (stories/attention) - scale varies and biases apply.

Let's take a rather large german regional newspaper and sketch what happens if they'd open up their archives and georeference each and every article they've run in the last 10 years. Boom. They'd blast away by sheer volume and again distort the cartogram above - biase it towards a more regional focus.

The still unanswered question: why do they use Google Maps (or Yahoo or LiveMaps) rather than maintain their own mapping engines? Most common answer: "because it is free". Sure. Free. Why would you as a newspaper give away the most precious asset for free ...?

Ideas?