Rachael and myself are in Indianapolis at this year's Museums and the Web conference. Yesterday I went to a fascinating talk by Aaron Straup Cope from Flickr, who I remember gushing about before. He talked about Flickr's on going experiments with trying to "reverse geocode" place names from a given lat-long co-ordinate.

Tools exist to help with this, for instance Yahoo have their own GeoPlanet resource, where one can retrieve a Where On Earth ID (WOEID), for the name of a place both vertically (Brighton is in East Sussex is in England is in Europe etc.), and horizontally (Brighton is bordered by Hove is bordered by Portslade etc.). But interesting, and passionately disputed issues arise when describing regions and neighbourhoods. Just where does Soho in London start and stop, for instance?

He then went on and fried my jet-lagged brain with talk of alpha shapes, and ice cream cones, but that's a bigger subject.

It also brought up the lovely work of Stamen Design, who have been doing a lot of work around the idea of "custom cartography", one example of which is their Artscope project for SFMOMA.