Today is The Map Room\u2019s 20th anniversary.<\/p>\n
The rule of thumb is that an item is vintage<\/em> if it\u2019s more than 40 years old, and antique<\/em> if it\u2019s more than 100 years old. (That tan-coloured Replogle globe with South Sudan on it? Not antique.) Time runs faster on the web, though: something 20 years old feels geologically<\/em> ancient. Running a 20-year-old blog in 2023 feels like keeping a pet coelacanth: you\u2019re keeping a living fossil alive.<\/p>\n As social media approaches what may well be its extinction event, there\u2019s been a lot of talk about \u201cbringing back blogs.\u201d Um, blogs never went away: Kottke.org just marked its 25th anniversary<\/a>, and there are still plenty of websites out there powered by WordPress or something similar that don\u2019t call themselves blogs. What faded away, I think, was the idea of, and self-identification as, a blogger<\/em>. Lots of people started blogs in the format\u2019s early years but didn\u2019t keep up with them; social media was a better fit for what they wanted to do. Not many people start a blog qua<\/em> blog to be a blogger nowadays. But institutions still post updates in blog form, and experts share their insights on platforms that blur the lines between blog, social media and newsletter.<\/p>\n (Certainly the map blog never went away: we still have general-interest blogs like Maps Mania<\/a> and Lat \u00d7 Long<\/a>; industry and academic figures like Matthew Edney<\/a>, Kenneth Field<\/a> and James Killick<\/a> regularly post commentary and links; and plenty of working cartographers share their latest creations on blogging platforms as well.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>)<\/p>\n The Map Room is not an institution, nor am I an expert. No really: I\u2019m not. The idea that someone with an intense interest in a subject but not much knowledge could start a blog as a way to explore the subject\u2014\u201can exercise in self-education\u201d is what I called it\u2014was something that made sense in 2003. It might be a bit more archaic now.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> I am also, twenty years on, rather more self-educated: I understand what I\u2019m linking to more than I used to, and I\u2019ve seen enough to know when to be skeptical. I\u2019ve called bullshit on more than one occasion. I still can\u2019t make a map of my own (there\u2019s an alternate universe in which I\u2019m making a perfectly happy living as a freelance cartographer), but my appreciation for them is all the richer for having spent two decades at this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"