The darker the blue the higher the fraction of foreign Facebook connections with the imperial power in question. (Facebook has not shared the underlying percentage data, just the ranking.) These closely correspond to countries or territories which were, whether wholly or in part, at one point under British, French, Spanish or Portuguese rule, as seen in the bottom set of maps.

FORBES: The Facebook Empires

MessageLabs, the email-filtering company that Symantec acquired in 2008, posted a set of word maps today measuring the frequency of terms in spam emails from a random one-week sampling of junk mail pulled from the most prolific spam-spewing botnets.

FORBES: The Most Common Words In Spam Email

One sweet new feature is the inclusion of a 2.6GB hard drive, which obviates the need to be switching SD cards when you need to change map sets (units will ship with a full set of street level maps of Europe).

ENGADGET: TomTom go 700 SatNav unit boasts Bluetooth, hard drive

The result is not so much an exact map of the landscape as a set of directions, but such recombination maps prove very useful.

FORBES: DeCode's Genetic Breakthrough Barely Registers

Ever since Googlereleased easy-to-use software tools for its nifty on-screen maps of streets and satellite images a year ago, fans have set off an explosion of creative overlaps, adding their own useful and sometimes quirky data.

FORBES: Magazine Article

That, in turn, has set off a race among companies like SpotCrime to turn crime data into mash-ups of maps and analytics, producing charts and graphs in Web-friendly formats.

FORBES: Colin Drane wants to be the kingpin of criminal data.