This is terrific, The True Size of Africa. Here’s just a corner to give you a taste:

In 1944, Harold Fisk mapped the historical paths of the Mississippi River. The result is beautiful (note the various other download options in the right margin). (via flowingdata)

Nice to see some awesomeness out of Redmond: check this Bing Maps demo where they automatically meld Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos into their street view using Photosynth. (via waxy)

The 50 U.S. states as a heart. The 50 U.S states as a skull. They should get together and make a t-shirt with one on the front and the other on the back.

Brilliant, accurate flyout view of the known universe, starting in Tibet and ending at the edge of the universe. I love that the endpoint shows the universe as a sphere floating in nothingness. I’ve never looked at it that way before:

(via kottke)

Fantastic rendering of the U.S. interstate system a la Beck’s tube map:

(via kottke)

I thought I was going to be really late to the party on this, but a quick Google Blog search doesn't turn up an inordinate number of matches, so...

You can now change your route in Google Maps by dragging and dropping the blue route line. Add waypoints, map alternate routes, etc. Very cool, great responsive UI, etc.

Google just launched My Maps, which provides a nice interface for creating your own custom maps with shapes, placemarks, etc. Idris posted the idea of using this as a tool for creating field maps.

Cool idea, I'm going to do this for our various pickup locations. I just played with this for five minutes, and it's really nice. You can draw fields. You can stick in placemarks, which users can click on to get the "directions to here" command. One thing: when you share the link, make sure you use the "Link to this Page" link. If you use your "My Maps" link then stuff like the Zoom and View (map, satellite, or hybrid) are not shared with the user, and the tool just zooms in as close as possible while still displaying all your custom objects (which is no good around here, since we live in the sticks and Google doesn't have imagery at that resolution).

Anyway, here's the result of my five minutes of fiddling.

The world according to Google.