Monthly Archives: December 2007

Talk-US

There’s now a mailing list for US OSMers!

House building

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.

Common Census

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:

Google Nukes Wikipedia from Orbit

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.

OSM cycle maps in every Cambridge house

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.”