Watch the talk of the century, Ubiquitous Geocontext from Where 2.0:
As Google translates this article by Luc Vaillancourt:
Who among all these people, representatives of companies, organizations, movements and products, is currently the “hot”?
This is Steve Coast (aka Stave C.).
He initiated the movement of mass collaboration in producing voluntary (professional or amateur) Geographic Information mainly road OpenStreetMap.
It is now serious business with startup CloudMade. CloudMade offer aims to provide an alternative to Google Maps API, but operating a software stack open source and data from OpenStreetMap.
He gave a good conference (see here) where I particularly liked his last 2 minutes (minute 14:40) when he starts sentences like:
- Think of what Openness means to you.
- Google Map Maker is open but there’re restrictions on the license.
- GeoPlanet is amazing but there is still dependency on Yahoo! Itself.
- TomTom think they have a community because you can fix a street. They do not. They have a set of data to customers giving them.
And the last slide of his presentation, a wink of a second Google Pardons and Ed:
- As open as my Clenched Fist – FakeEdParsons
… I suspect Steve C. to personify FakeEdParsons (http://twitter.com/FakeEdParsons). It denies the real Ed and swear not to know who it is. Ed is a false be virtual funniest of the community with a sentence like the following:
“Come and learn how lat49 GeoCommons and no longer have business models at the Google Booth” (in reference to the announcement of Google Maps API Data and Maps Ad Unit).
Want to get involved in OpenStreetMap but don’t have a GPS or even computer? Now there’s walking papers.
Walking papers lets you print out a OSM map and then write on it. Get home, scan it in and then that map can be drawn on top of using familiar OSM tools. To do this, it prints magic codes on the edge of the map that can be recognised when scanned back in to geolocate the image. If you don’t even have a printer or scanner, they’ll print and scan for you via the postal service. You can meet the author of walking maps, Mike Migurski, and try it out this weekend at the San Francisco Mapping Party.
Check out this heatmap of Tiles@Home data. It shows the size, and thus an approximate complexity, of T@H tiles uploaded to the server. A blank tile of the middle of the sea is much smaller than tiles with complex map data on them. Click for the original image an read more here
Check out the cuteness-o-meter in this picture from ikiya on twitter. Thanks to Sarah for the link.
Check out this video and blog post made by Gary Gale of the Y! Geo Blog interviewing various people at Where 2.0. Of course OSM has a presence 
Skip to about half way through to get straight to the OSM bit, but the first 5 minutes are also worth a watch.
Note: Thea, Dirk and Sarah work for CloudMade running events like mapping parties (see here for the blog and events), the video erroneously attributes them to OSM. Of course they contribute a huge amount to OSM, but we have to be clear to avoid flames
Thanks to the hack weekend we now have translations in German and partially French on the main OpenStreetMap site. It figures out your language from your browser string preference.
Want to help get OSM in more languages? Get involved on the dev@ mailing list.