Did you hear the soft murmur of something new and cartographically delightful on the WWWs this evening?

Yep, outside.in's new embeddable StoryMaps are here to plot your blog posts by location. Sign up for GeoToolkit to grab one for yourself. It's super-easy to import your RSS feed and tag posts with places and neighborhoods.

If you detected a note of map-lust in my tone, it might be because I started working at outside.in last week, and it's awesome.

The wikipedia article for map, btw, is also pretty fab:

A map is a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes.

Yep, a StoryMap is just what like that, but with a symbolic depiction of your blog posts' relationship to that space thrown in. How can you beat that?

update: StoryMaps now fit in sidebars. Check out the slickness under my search box.

Inspired by Britta's interesting annotation of her top 10 del.icio.us tags, I took a look at mine.

1. internet (200): Mostly articles or sites about the internet, ranging in quality from silly meta jokes to heady philosophical articles.
2. culture (170): Culture is pretty tough to define. I'd say these are links about the way people interact: online, through advertising, and in life generally. Occasionally a link that's sort of…uh…"cultured" will slip in there too, such as New York Magazine's NYC Books Canon.
3. humor (157): I spend a lot of time clicking on funny stuff on the internet, ok people?
4. technology (146): Lots of web-related links here too, but these also include non-internet tech, like the Phoenix Mars Mission's discovery of ice or—more importantly—sheep sculptures made of telephones.
5. art (134): Weird art I've seen on the WWWs.
6. funny (104): This is mostly redundant to my humor tag. When I first started using del.icio.us I didn't like the idea of adjectives as tags, but I've loosened up with the last 104 funny things I bookmarked.
7. design (98): These links have some crossover with art (in fact 57 of my links share the two tags) but tend to be more about graphic or web design and don't include conceptual art.
8. history (94): I'm a nerd.
9. politics (86): Mostly interesting articles about whatever's going on at the time.
10. news (83): I'm a little surprised that this appears in my top 10, since I don't think of myself as a real news hound.

Of course, most of my dominant tags were pretty clear when I bookmarked del.icio.us/kenspeckle wordle art a few months back. Also interesting is that my top 4 tags cover this blog's supposed topics.

More compelling than my top 10 tags, however, is the top 10 for all of del.icio.us. Oddly enough, my top 10 list doesn't overlap at all with the 10 most popular tags for all users:

1. design
2. blog
3. video
4. software
5. tools
6. music
7. programming
8. webdesign
9. reference
10. tutorial

The moral of the story being that most people bookmark much more useful stuff than I do.