Slate’s Future Tense writer Will Oremus argues that we are in the golden age of maps.  Click through for some mapy goodness.  Obviously, I agree since I was saying something similar just yesterday.

One thing he touches on that is worth pointing out is how much more easily accessible government data is with the mass acceptance of the Internet.  Whereas before it would be a tough slough through reams of paper data, now you can download everything and create a program to tear through gigabytes of information for free and process it any way you’d like to present it.  Given, this is still a lot of effort, but there are a lot of people willing to go through that effort.  And all you have to do is spend a little time on the Internet to see that hard work put to good use.