A Global Poverty Map Derived from Satellite Data – This is an old paper from 2006, but I love the idea of using how much light that a neighborhood sends into to the night sky to measure how wealthy it is. Richness is highly correlated with wastefulness, apparently.

Open Multi-lingual WordNets – We’re mapping our inner worlds too, these open data sets are incredibly useful information on word meanings for anyone working with computers and human languages.

The Invisible City – A fake Canadian city briefly appeared on OpenStreetMap, complete with an elaborate public transport network. Or was it briefly a real place blinking in and out of existence, with only a lone volunteer mapper spotting it?

The Dark Side of Social Capital – We usually think of community as a good thing, but anybody who grew up in a small town can tell you that the power can be used to exclude outsiders too.

K2C 1N5 – Ervin Ruci is being hounded by the Canadian Postal Service for the crime of making a crowdsourced database of postal codes freely available, and now they’ve decided they own the copyright to the words “postal code” too!