Archive for April, 2008

Today is Koninginnedag, a Dutch holiday celebrating the queen’s birthday. Sure, we’re a little royal-starved here in the USA, but here’s a good reason to observe Queen’s Day: Oranjegekte.

Oranjegekte means “orange craziness” or “orange madness” and means pretty much that. In wikipedia’s typically gripping prose, “The most important characteristic is the colour orange that dominates the street scene with flags and banners, clothing and even ordinary consumer goods.” Sounds like a good idea to me. I like orange ordinary consumer goods, I guess we were just a little late celebrating last year.

Happy slightly belated Queen’s Day to all my friends at the old ’switch BV. Have an orange stroopwafel for me.

Let me call to your attention two excellent maps that in my humble opinion should make sweet cartographic love and spawn a mashup of some sort. This confluence of maps, blogs and public transportation has got the limeduck quacking loudly.

First up, Boston Blogs’ map of Boston blog by T stop.

Still in beta, this excellent map is simply the MBTA’s official subway (and Silver line) map with a link at each station to blogs tagged with that T stop. It looks like Davis square is the belle of the ball with 25 blogs as of this writing, and my own dear Central has a respectable showing at 15 blogs. The Red line is not surprisingly the bloggiest MBTA line.

My second nominee is Unmapped Boston from Unmapped Cities.

This is a completely new view of the Boston area. It combines major streets, subway routes, and most importantly, a pretty comprehensive list of the squares that define Boston neighborhoods, all while remaining substantially but not literally true to geography. The map is available on paper ($20, get one today, I just did!) and is a beautiful work of design.

Here’s my immodest proposal: Unmapped Boston should hook up with Boston Blogs to create a cartographic listing of Boston area blogs by square, and not just the squares that have T stops. Sure, there’s lots of geotagging going on and you can find blogs by longitude and latitude, but I think I prefer a neighborhood-centric blog geography. It’s not so specific that it sets off privacy alarms, and it lets neighbor blogs self-identify their location to the area that suits them best.

So don’t forget, list your blog at Boston Blogs and check out Unmapped Boston, and if you like them, maybe encourage them to get together sometime for a coffee. No pressure.

I used to think people who scoured the access logs on their personal web sites were a little odd. I know why you’d do that for work, but why do it on your own time?  Well, now I’m one of them. And while looking over a list of recent limereaders, I found this odd-looking url:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=it&sl=en&u=http://limeduck.com/category/
writing/&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dlime%2Bwrite.it
%26hl%3Dit%26lr%3D%26sa%3DG

It appears that somebody is reading limeduck in Italian via Google translate. I wonder if it makes any more sense in Italian? It could hardly make less.  If you’re reading this in another language, please comment - in any language, I’ll use google translate right back - and tell us how any why.

For extra recursive meta-credit, I’ve added this post to the category referenced in the translation url, so it should show up in Italian in the link above.  It’s the little things that make blogging worth it.

Why is there a giant duck outside Cambridge City Hall right now?

A. Cambridge opens its gates to admit the Trojan Duck
B. A giant rubber duck admonishes Cantabrigians to reduce litter to keep local waters clean
C. The city of Cambridge finally recognizes Duck Day as a city holiday

answer after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »