In the Making beautiful maps session description, Alan and Thomas aptly point out that the web has long moved past the stock maps and red pins age. Emerging web mapping technology allows us to inexpensively create maps, seamlessly integrate them with a site’s design, depict the latest changes in sensitive political borders, show complex geo located data, use sophisticated data visualization techniques, and deliver all of the above blazingly fast without relying on large providers of stock maps like Google or Yahoo.

TileMill makes creating great looking maps for the web a heck of a lot easier. If you haven’t thought about creating custom maps for your projects in the past because of the amount of work that it entailed, it’s likely now in your reach.

Demo and BoF

Eric will demo TileMill in the Making beautiful maps session on Wednesday at 1:00 pm. At 11:00 am tomorrow Eric and I will lead a BoF where we will show you step by step how to use TileMill, TileStream, and OpenLayers to create, host, and integrate custom map tiles for Drupal.

Check out the screencast on TileMill if you haven’t done so yet

• Wednesday, March 9 at 11:00 am, TileMill BoF

• Wednesday, March 9 at 1:00 pm, TileMill demo in Making beautiful maps session