Mappit.ai — every place has a story: the world's news on a live, interactive map

Mappit — every place has a story

The world's zeitgeist on a map. Mappit turns the world's news into a living, interactive map. An always-on news engine continuously reads what is happening in nearly two thousand places — its own crawler, which reads the world's publishers directly and supplies more than nine in ten new stories, working alongside frontier AI from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI in the jobs a crawler cannot do — and pins each story to the place it is about, on an interactive, time-aware map of the planet. Zoom into any city and you see what's happening there right now — grouped by topic, colored by mood, drawn only from publishers that clear a reliability bar and weighted toward the most trusted, marked with how many independent sources found it, and with every source link checked so the stories you read actually lead somewhere real. Scrub the calendar backwards and the map replays how the world looked on any past day, because each day's record is kept rather than replaced.

On top of that news layer, Mappit adds live views of the physical planet — earthquakes, wildfires, air quality, and weather — and a market layer that plots stock movements at companies' real headquarters. A built-in AI guide named Marco answers questions about any place and cites its sources — the news there and, from an atlas of open data, its population, borders and statistics, each figure with its year and source. Seven map apps show the numbers beside the news: they color the world's countries and America's states, counties and congressional districts by the economy, population, health, conflict and the 2026 US elections, from open data, and play them back through time. Anyone can browse for free; a subscription unlocks the ability to create and share your own places, collections, and data layers. And AI assistants can read Mappit directly: add https://mappit.ai/mcp to Claude, ChatGPT or another assistant, free and without an account.

The core idea is simple and durable: place + time is the most natural way to organize what is happening in the world, and the value compounds every day as the record grows. The map is the interface; the permanent, corroborated, geolocated corpus of world events beneath it is the substance.

Mappit requires JavaScript for the interactive map. Every public place, pin, collection and profile also has a crawlable page — see the sitemap.

Banjul, The Gambia

What's happening in Banjul, The Gambia — 24 local stories, 0 community pins, live on the Mappit map.

Mappit's analysis

Geography & Setting

Banjul sits at the mouth of the Gambia River, on St Mary's Island, where the river empties into the Atlantic. It's a low-lying, flood-prone sliver of land connected to the mainland by bridges and a causeway, with mangrove creeks and tidal flats framing its edges. The city's small footprint has long shaped its role: more administrative capital and port than sprawling metropolis, with most of the country's population and commerce actually based across the bridge in the Greater Banjul Area (Serrekunda and beyond).

History

Banjul was founded in 1816 as Bathurst, a British colonial outpost established to help suppress the Atlantic slave trade by controlling the river mouth. It grew into the administrative and trading hub of British Gambia, its street grid and old colonial buildings — including Government House and the Anglican cathedral — still tracing that 19th-century layout. Renamed Banjul at independence in 1965, it became the capital of the newly sovereign Gambia, though it never grew into a major population center the way secondary cities like Serrekunda did.

People & Demographics

Banjul proper is notably small and has been gradually shrinking relative to its suburbs, as residents and commerce migrate to the mainland conurbation. The population that remains is a mix of Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, and other Gambian ethnic groups, alongside a long-standing Krio (Aku) community tied to the city's founding era. English remains the official language, layered over widely spoken Wolof and Mandinka.

Economy & Markets

The Port of Banjul is the country's main gateway for trade, handling the bulk of Gambia's imports and exports and anchoring much of the city's economic life. Albert Market, sprawling near the waterfront, is the classic commercial heart — textiles, produce, crafts, and fish sold amid narrow, crowded lanes. Government offices and ministries also keep a steady daytime population moving through the city even as residential life drains toward the suburbs.

Culture & Character

Banjul carries a faded-colonial charm: wooden shopfronts, wide verandas, and a slower pace than its energetic mainland neighbors. It's a city of contrasts — official capital by title, but modest and quiet in practice, with real nightlife and density found elsewhere in Greater Banjul. Arch 22, built to mark a change in government, stands as one of its more visible modern landmarks.

Current Currents

The blackout protests and President Barrow's emergency pledge land hard in a city like Banjul, where infrastructure has always been stretched thin for a small capital serving a much larger metro area. Reliable power has long been an Achilles' heel here — new generation capacity promised by late October will be watched closely by a public whose patience, this week, boiled over.