OpenGeoData is moving to posterous and so your feeds will move. The blog URL itself will remain static – opengeodata.org.

• RSS feed will move to here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Opengeodata
• Podcast feed is now here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/OpengeodataPodcasts

Now that the feeds are with feedburner, they should remain static (they haven’t moved in 4 years so far anyway).

WordPress has become too much of a PITA to manage for many reasons and posterous is just a pleasure to use. Unfortunately the wordpress to posterous import is not complete yet though. The basic problem is that in lots of posts here on opengeodata, we link to content (like podcasts and pictures) which reside here on opengeodata. Posterous isn’t clever enough yet to grab all of those things and host them… so if I did the import and then changed the domain over, we’d lose all of that media. I have unsuccessfully asked for help fixing this with a script and using the posterous and wordpress APIs or something.

Thus unless anyone wants to help, this entire blog is going to move to old.opengeodata.org and will be mothballed. A new blog will appear at www.opengeodata.org powered by posterous. Anyone with existing accounts who wants to post to the new blog should get in touch, it’s all pretty easy. The good news is that we can at any point in the future import the old content, or at least I hope so anyway.

So long, and thanks for all the maps!

Pretty cool, huh?

You might be interested in the results of a meeting the USGS held on VGI and its implications. Minutes, presentations etc are over here.

The Washington Post attended a recent OpenStreetMap mapping party.

New York Times mentions OSM and Haiti. As does New Scientist.

The Guardian brings everyone up to date on OpenStreetMap’s progress.

Also, interesting article by Nat on opening up data.

“We are excited to be adding support for OSM to the DecisionTree product. I am a big fan of the OpenStreetMap project. The effort has proven enormously successful at developing and maintaining a global map that can be shared and used for a wide range of purposes,” said Avencia CEO Robert Cheetham. “We’re thrilled that we have been able to extend the ArcGIS Flex API to add support for OpenStreetMap.”

Link to the press release.

While we’re at it, there’s a neat recent ESRI blog post on using OSM in ESRI products here.

Check this out:

[..] I am currently in Port Au Prince with the Fairfax County Urban Search & Rescue Team (USA-1) out of Fairfax, VA, USA. I wish there was a way that I can express to you properly how important your OSM files were to us. Most of our team members own their own Garmin Rino and 60CSx units on top of the units we already have in the cache. Having these detailed maps on our GPS units is a big deal. Shortly after discovering your work I quickly spread the word and transferred the street level maps onto as many Garmin units as we could before sending the American rescue teams on the streets. The team members are thrilled to have this resource you have created. I wish you could see their faces ‘light up’ when I take their GPS unit and tell them that I’m going to give them street level detail maps. They have been working VERY hard and anything that can help them in every aspect of their mission here is greatly appreciated. I am spreading the word about this work to all rescue and humanitarian teams on the ground here in Haiti. Please be assured that we are using your data – I just wish we knew about this earlier. THANK YOU!

Check out the wiki for more.

Nice article here:

A volunteer-led project to create an open-source map of the entire earth, calledOpenStreetMap, has amassed over 200,000 contributors since its inception, the founder announced in a blog entry.

The project has attracted over 100,000 users since last March alone, noted founder Steve Coast. He predicts that, given this rate of growth, the contributor base will reach a million by this August.

Maposmatic – the site which lets you make OSM maps with grids and indexes – has been updated with a bunch of new features:

* Support for the whole world. Any location in the world can now be
rendered on maposmatic.org.

* OpenStreetMap database updated daily. Until now, the database had
never been updated since the service was started in September
2009. Now, the geographic database used to render the maps is
updated daily, providing maps with the latest contributions to
OpenStreetMap. Each map contains the date at which it was
generated.

* Better city search engine. Thanks to Nominatim, we now provide a
search engine that allows to find cities in a much more usable way:
cities with the same name can be distinguished and the search works
even when the city name is not completely correct.

* Support for other languages. A few parts of the map rendering
process is language-dependent and we now have the infrastructure to
use language-dependent code. For the moment, we support English,
French and Italian, but we are waiting for your contributions to
support other languages. The website has also been translated to
German and Italian.

* Amenities in the index. In addition to the streets, we have added
important amenities to the index: schools, town hall, post offices,
places of worship, etc.

OSM has cleared 200,000 users (see the stats page)! You can also check out more stats on the wiki.