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!
Google says up yours farewell to TeleAtlas in the US, see this blog post. Europe has to be next what with the unknown (wink wink) patron which caused the AND share price jump (press release).
I’m sure Google will now want to release this data due to popular support given their own want to know “… why do they [Transport for London] make it so difficult to license their schedule data..” (link) and thus the clear problems surrounding closed map data.
So have a click around on Google Maps and see what it’s like to have (c) Google at the bottom right instead of (c) TeleAtlas 🙂
update Lots of comments on a post by James Fee
Google didn’t pay shit for this crap. They roll into city/county with “free” google earth pro licenses and the city/county gives them everything for free.
Happened to us and I know someone out on the left coast who had the same sales pitch.
Which sounds eerily familiar to the way they hoovered up transit data to the exclusion of others. Also see a post by Peter Batty
The OSM Foundation website is now run on mediawiki, the same software which powers wikipedia and a billion other websites.
This makes it easier for us to make it useful, rearrange content and update things. This helps you, in that it’s less of a maze of twisty passages that the old wordpress site became. It’s a work in progress.
CloudMade released a set of media fast facts yesterday (also see the blog post).
CloudMade have been using it to help journalists get their heads around OSM and it’s a common thing to give out. It’s being released under a CC license so feel free to rip, mix and burn!
(disclaimer: I co-founded CloudMade)
Check out this wired article
Using eight cheap webcams, a GPS receiver and open-source software, West Point graduate Roy D. Ragsdale built a rig that can do what Google’s Street-View cars do: take images of the world around it and stitch them together into panoramas. The difference? This version can be carried on your head and cost just $300 to make. The hacked-together software suite can even throw out files that can be viewed in Google Earth.
OpenStreetMap now recognises a total of 51 languages for the main website and is available over at TranslateWiki if you want to help with the effort of refining those or adding more!
Check out the clear progress for each language and also chart of strings added per day.
As avar says, “with a week more of Translatewiki we should have as much translation activity as we’ve gotten in all the time since the site was made translatable in May”.
Andy has updated the OpenStreetMap Stats graphs as he does monthly. Check them out – of course the main problem with scale free graphs is they, er, are scale free and hence look the same all the time plus noise.
When you tag photos in flickr with OSM metadata like ‘osm:way=30089216’ the squirrels will busily work to figure out what you’re talking about and link over to OSM. See this example and scroll down to look at the machine tags and stuff on the right. It figured out the building from the road it’s on and the name of the photo. Magic.
Also, check out the flick blog post on the subject.
Woo! Check it out.
San Jose, California – September 16, 2009 – deCarta, the leading supplier of software and services for the Location-Based Services (LBS) industry, today announced the launch of its beta program supporting OpenStreetMap (OSM) data.
The beta program makes the OSM content available for selected cities around the world. A product release that will support the complete coverage of OSM is scheduled for October 2009.
Interesting article here:
The City of Johannesburg is closing off its GIS data in a ‘cost recovery’ move that other South African municipalities are set to follow. This, say some industry players, is not in keeping with Joburg’s plans to become ‘a world-class African city’.
Go to the City of Johannesburg’s ‘e-services’ online mapping site on a Mac or on a Firefox browser and you’ll be disappointed. In bold red letters, a notice reads: ‘PLEASE NOTE: The online map viewer is only compatible with Internet Explorer 6 or higher…’
The problems don’t end here. Further along in the process, you’ll see a ‘disclaimer’ that reads: ‘The contents may not be copied, reproduced, redistributed to third parties in any form for any purpose whatsoever, or applied to commercial use without the written consent of the Council.’
