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Comment by noirman | Hacker News Reader

It's really beautiful. But it's practically useless.

Thanks, and sorry the maps aren't useful to you. They're artifacts of the process of trying to understand the world, and maybe someday I'll make it all the way there.

The maps are not useless. In fact, they are tremendously valuable. If that is not observable, the fault lies in the observer.

I believe LIVE versions of the maps are a tremendous idea .. would you consider building a site replete with such an effort? Live versions of many (if not all) of your maps would make a tremendous contribution to the way our mobs conceive themselves.

(Perhaps this is something for ifft&co..)

I would love to make live versions of these, but the rate of data coming in is slow enough that they don't work very well in real time—even New York only has one geotagged tweet every 4 seconds, so using it would mostly be sitting and waiting for something to happen. A retrospective of the past day would probably be practical and might be useful, though.

I've registered to this site to let you know that I absolutely adore this work. I've added you as a contact on Flickr to see what else you are able to create.

These are beautiful maps, Eric. I'm a GIS/software developer living in your old haunt (Hyde Park), and I love stuff like this...especially with Chicago data. GIS folks love comparing old maps to new maps. Do you currently make any of your maps available in high-quality print format (e.g. http://store.axismaps.com/)?

Like many things, including works of art. But that doesn't mean it's worthless, and we shouldn't treat it as such.

Maybe for you but these maps can be very useful for urban planners.

Anything that is beautiful is useful.

It may be practically useless today but what if he rendered how people are connected to locations (via geotagged tweets and photos), in realtime, something like that flighttracker.. this has good potential man.

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