World Map Projections

As a big fan of world maps and also because I have been for a while programing some things on it, I am going to show my favorite world map projections:

This projection belongs to the equal-area projection category, which means it tries to represent countries in their correct proportional size. I think the first well known app using it was 43places.com.

For a long time, this map made in flash was the main map of the 43places application so the users were able to select countries and see which ones were visited, 'want to visit', etc. From my point of view this map was the best choice. However, they later switched to google maps maybe because of the specificity of the markers. Although you still can access the flash version from its users' profile.

This one belongs (among other categories) to the compromised projection ones. Its goal is to find a balance between different kinds of distortions.

That representation can be seen everywhere in the Wikipedia.

Probably the most popular of the Cyllindrical Equal-Area. However, similar projections like Behrmann or Hobo-Dyer make the countries look less strange. They all differ in the ratio of the vertical to horizontal axis, especially close to the pole areas

I haven't found any web app using them though.

Also called 'evil mercator' since it's the worst one in terms of distortion of the countries. Greenland is 554% bigger than its real size, Canada 258%, USA 68%, etc.

It's still commonly used in a lot of places. For instance, google maps uses it. Although my guess is that 95% of the use of google maps is not at the world view zoom level.