It’s nothing short of spectacular watching the share price of TomTom and other PND manufacturers over the last 48 hours:

What can you say but :-O

Google just nuked from orbit the entire PND industry:

Which leaves everyone from PND manufacturers to waze to carriers wondering what’s next. There’s been lots of commentary already that I won’t repeat.

You’ve gotta give it to these guys for technical ability in any case.

Check out this use of OSM data to make music. They map longitude to time and latitude to pitch with some city data. Or you can play it directly from this post as below:

We’ve built the £800 necessary for the purchase of the openstreetmaps.org domain name, so thanks to all who donated!

Yes, it’s true:

Have a look at this PDF showing where people edited (not where they live!) over an 8 week period. Germany leads the way!

Thanks to some great work by Grant Slater and Andy Robinson all those people who mistake openstreetmap for openstreetmaps will now get directed to the right place.

But here’s the downside – we snapped up the domain to avoid the price going up and now we have to cover the costs of it. So make sure you feel good about yourself today by donating something toward the £800 that was needed over here on the donation site! Already about 10% has been found, so help out 🙂

Nice wired article:

A California county’s three-year battle to prevent a nonprofit group from obtaining public mapping data has ended disastrously for the county after it was ordered by a court to pay the group $500,000 in legal costs.

Last February, Santa Clara County, the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, was ordered to hand over the public records to the California First Amendment Coalition for a minimal duplication fee after initially trying to charge $250,000 for the data and then appealing to the federal government to designate the data a national security secret that couldn’t be released. This week the county paid out to the coalition twice the amount in legal fees that it had once hoped to rake in as profit for the data.

The BBC news website has a popular story on OSM over here. Money quote:

Atlanta, the capital of the US state of Georgia will soon be the world’s most digitally mapped city, according to organisers of a massive “mapathon”.
OpenStreetMap, or OSM, is behind the effort to produce a map more accurate than anything else on the market.

The story has been in the top shared box (look on the right) for most of the day. Awesome!