Someone reads Tufte A great hypothetical information graphics from Jason Kottke shows how an ideal map of WiFi (wireless ethernet) availability might look. My only quibble: the map makes it look like there's data for every location where color is displayed, similar to a infrared overlay from a satellite. WiFi availability data tends to be a lot more sparsely populated, and it also tends to vary in a fairly non-linear nature, making interpolation difficult. You can get signal at one spot, then move two feet over and not get anything (especially in urban areas where sigal reflects.) Perhaps there should be an imposed grid of vectors showing the direction to the nearest access point, kind of a like the wind arrows on a vector map.
*Tufte refers to Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitatve Information, Envisioning Information and a number of other great books on displaying numeric and factual data in ways that leverage our visual skills. A great lecturer, too. I wish more web designers were forced to read and digest his bibles on information design.
