Dots Are Good Again

Dots on maps are everywhere. Some Web maps are bunches of cutter-dots, with illegible cartography. Here's a really nice example, which is a collection of user-contributed wireless coverage outage reports:

Get your bifocals out. 

With all these dots out there for thousands of static categories plus anything location-tagged from the social scope of networking, I grow nearsighted from place-based data - it's produced by anyone and everyone with a Web browser or a mobile phone and it always looks the same in massive quantities from afar at small scales - really bad. 

So, when new augmented reality visualization alternatives emerge (e.g. @LayarMobile and @crashcorp) that leverage camera, GPS, and magnetometer sensor-richness, I get excited about the possibilities and what I can see. Check out the below examples. Floating dots in a 3D real world look much better:

Very nice.