Kitchener and Waterloo, Ontario Interactive Maps with Open Street Map

Good evening memers, over the last few days I've been hacking together some more features and interactive meme maps for Famous Meme Maps. I chose two local cities to test this new interactive mapping style to hopefully give inspiration to locals who might be interested in interactive meme mapping. Using regional community planning divisions for a city like Kitchener might have some familiar areas but I felt that looking at the maps without streets or other landmarks was hard to read. To counter this, for regional/city maps I've decided to add Open Street Maps to better visualize the boundaries of each community within the city.

To test the new format, I've made a map about pizzerias in Kitchener, as I'm more familiar with that city than Waterloo. With Waterloo I made a troll map indicative of the amount of condos going up in the region. I shared the Waterloo map to Reddit, and while it brought a lot of traffic to the site, I think I might be better suited to find mapping communities to share this site with. The consensus was that the map was confusing. Part of interactive maps is creating community art, collaboratively. A troll map it essentially a blank canvas that you can easily create that hopefully evokes a state of interest. I was hopeful that others would see the commentary I was trying to share, maybe appreciate it for what it's saying (an abstract bashing on condo development and on housing in general). But alas, there was not much feedback except some downvotes. There was a user who submitted "Bluevale Collegiate Institute" to Willowdale community in Waterloo, so thank you anonymous user! I appreciate your contribution and hopefully you were able to get a glimpse of what this community is about (going to be about, not much of a community yet).

To end off, I will highlight that I'm still working on a "Traditional Meme Generator" that I shared on July 1st. This brings maps to familiar image macro templates like you're used to with memes. As the last blog post indicated, "meme" is a word that predates the internet and image macro memes we know and love today. Memes evolve and transform and this site allows you to easily accomplish the creation of finely tuned interactive maps that ideally transform on the whim of the community. It offers a way to view the world through a different lens to see what others are thinking while also giving you a vote to how these interactive meme maps should evolve. ✌