On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 13:15:34 +1030, Aidan Stanger wrote:

[Tower Gateway]
The best corporate sponsored name I've seen
for that station is Tower Somerfield!

Hehe, I agree that's good, but it wasn't in fitting with the way the
rest of the map worked so I didn't seriously consider it.

TfL might not be the only ones you annoy - the station you've named
Silver Spoon Town is right next to a competing company's sugar refinery!

Oh yes, so it is - hadn't thought of that!

You can probably save a lot of bandwidth by saving it as a jpeg or png
or optimized gif - those usually make much smaller files than pdfs.

I did wonder about that originally, but the 8-bit PNG I've put up on my
Flickr account is 609KB, about 130KB larger than the PDF. I could shrink
the PNG's dimensions a little further but it loses readability,
particularly in the tiny footnotes, which are barely legible even now.

I don't think you can really beat PDF for distributing something large
that originally consists wholly of vector graphics and text - except
perhaps if SVG ever gets widespread support (i.e. Internet Explorer
native support to match Opera and that popular one). The great advantage
of the PDF, of course, is that anyone who wants to print it can do so at
unlimited resolution (or rather, limited only by the resolution of their
printer).

Still I'm impressed - it took my website weeks to get a tenth as many
hits. How did you manage to get so much traffic so quickly?

I think BoingBoing was the key. Its post about the anagram map came up
as the first result on Google when I was seeing whether my tube map had
made it on there (the site had the word Sponsors in it above its ads),
and I thought, if they liked that, they might like this, so I submitted
it to them, and lo and behold:

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/21...don_under.html

It's quite interesting to see how different the pattern of hits has been
as a result - when I last did anything that got any significant
interest, there was a steady exponential-ish growth as it spread around
the web for quite some time, before a very, very long, slow tail
trailing off after the peak. With this it's had 6500 a day for the first
two days online, yet Technorati/Google Blog Search only show a handful
(25ish) of people linking to it. I think with BoingBoing there must be
two effects:

1) so many people read it that you get loads of hits from it

2) so many people read it that few of them think it's worth putting it
on their own weblogs afterwards, since they assume that everyone will
have seen it already on BoingBoing! (See opening remark he
http://www.jaykayess.com/archives/338 )

Anyway, that's enough meme theory for one day, time to go and eat some
sausages.

Paul

P.S. One last interesting fact - of the thousands to see it so far, only
one has clicked the e-mail address in it and sent me a message. I put it
in out of interest, to see if anyone would. Not even the bloke who runs
that site archiving all the spoof (and useful) maps let me know when he
took a copy of it for his site. Quite fitting that no-one would want to
speak to a stranger, though - it's just like being on the Tube in that
respect