Thanks for stopping by

It's time to bring the curtain down on Stats, Maps n Pix now, after 1.5 million page views and 150 posts. I'll leave the blog archived here, but if you're looking for me, you can always find me via my business website. 

When I started this blog as a replacement for my original one I was still working at a university doing academic stuff and it kind of fitted in with that. But now I'm not working in academia and instead I'm doing lots of interesting work with my company, Automatic Knowledge, so it's time to wrap it up here on the blog.

Overall, it's now been 15 years of blogging from me so I think I'm ready to do something else online, maybe a bit more on my Map Academy YouTube channel, who knows.

In the spirit of the age, here's an image to symbolise the end of the era, created using the Microsoft Bing Image Creator (powered by DALL·E 3) based on the following prompt: 

"create a photo of a party with lots of people in a dark room with drinks, lots of maps on the wall and in the background, overhead, is a banner that reads "thank you for stopping by".

We had a lovely imaginary party

We all know that this generative AI stuff is addictive, so I then decided to do another prompt, as follows:

"create a photo of someone looking really sad about a blog that is no longer online, with lots of cats and rabbits in the frame, plus candles and moody lighting and tilt shift"

And these were the results.

What does

Any of this

Have to do with

Stats, maps or pix?

The reason I'm adding these images here, beyond the fact that it is good fun to play with and also the obvious self-indulgence, is that I've been asked a few times recently about the potential and power of AI in the mapping and data space. I think there is lots of potential (e.g. with the kind of amazing stuff Steve Attewell is doing with overpass turbo queries and OSM data). I also think our jobs are mostly pretty safe but that the geo world will grow in size at the same time because of it. 

Some blog numbers

I have had a look at the blog stats as of 17 November 2023 and it seems that anything I wrote about population density got lots of clicks, which proves it's not just me that is interested in it. At the time of writing here are the top 10 most popular blog posts on Stats, Maps n Pix.

Density is cool, yeah

I think that's just about all there is to say, so let's end with one more generative AI image.

Thank you for having me

"create a realistic photo of a man working in a dark room, at a computer, logging off for the last time, with a bright neon sign on the wall saying "THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME" - and the man has a dog in the room and it's in silhouette and there is a desk lamp on"