OpenGeoData

There’s now a mailing list for US OSMers!

Tom has a nice post about not making your map animations look like a 1942 bombing raid, viz the below image of ‘91 forest fires in Oakland which also show up in work that he/Stamen did.

Oh and Ben at lunch mentioned paleo-future which is well worth a look.

I’m at a fun workshop on ‘vgi’ or volunteered geographic information organised by NCGIA. Everything from platial to OSM and mainly in an academic context. Check out Mike Goodchild’s paper on VGI, which mentions OSM and others.

Check out this vernacular map of the US from Common Census which were just shown in a presentation. It shows what city people feel part of. Have a look around the site and check out the other maps:

See coverage of knol here and here. It’s incredible they can’t even bring themselves to mention wikipedia in their own announcement. To be fair wikipedia has stagnated in that the mediawiki software hasn’t changed much in years, and the anti-advertising stance is pretty short sighted and just leads to big ’save wikipedia, donate!’ banners every 3 weeks. But. Still. Why kill the puppy?

This is the real jumping the shark moment for that do no evil commandment. I wonder what freebase will do.

Update: Ok so it’s more competition, but Google engages with Firefox to the point of basically running it. So, why not contribute to either the wikimedia foundation or add features to mediawiki? And ok if they tried that and it didn’t work out… but there’s been no meniton of that.

David Earl (who mapped much of Cambridge) writes to the talk list to say “OSMers may be interested to know that this map [...] is currently being distributed to every home in Cambridge and most Cambridge University students via the colleges.”

Awsome

As my fake self points out, the OSM Christmas Party is on Friday evening. On the weekend there are mapping parties in Medway and Newcastle.

Fake SteveC joins Fake Ed Parsons

On all accounts the OSM Brighton launch went swimmingly with posters distributed to all:

It was also the launch day for The Deckchair Guide – a guide to Brighton – using OSM maps!

Stanley in The Falklands are now mapped thanks to work by Russ Phillips