That’s about 231 straight days worth of GPS data if you conservatively have it at 1 point a second. It actually represents a much longer time since a lot of people go out and collect track data for a few hours a day at most, and often at less frequent intervals than 1 hertz. The lucky point (48.30426, 11.919947) was in this GPX upload.

Nick Black is keeping a blog of his OSM activities which include his Masters thesis…

This post to the OSM mailing list kicks off the voting / nominating for the OSM Foundation initial board, with wiki activity too. This follows a past IRC discussion.

This is a pic of Nick Hill’s car after being loaded with servers, rack cabinets and stuff. It took hours of work, and Nick drilled out some rivets to take the cabinet apart. Currently we’re waiting on the official green light on hosting, at which point all this stuff will get installed.

Richard picks out a great Guy Debord quote in his review of Simon Sadler’s The Situationist City. I’ve found a longer version of the quote which I’ll reproduce for posterity here:

“With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental derives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influence, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is not worse than that of the first navigational charts; the only difference is that it is a matter no longer of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.”

Fantastically resonant, that.

— Tom

Openstreetmap had its first spam yesterday from someone uploading a html file (a web page) as a GPX file (a GPS trace file). Being XML (similar format), it got parsed and uploaded with spam-like tags linking to the individuals business. The point being that google etc would crawl the pages and increase his page rank. It exposes the soft underbelly of openstreetmap’s policy of crossing bridges when we get to them – we’ve only had good bridges so far!

Mikel blogs about various interesting audio quotes which skim the openstreetmap meme. I’ll add this IT Conversations mp3 where Peter Cochrane follows a similar thread. Worth a listen.

Part two of taggable gps trace support is now live in openstreetmap. There’s still quite some work to do: RSS is missing, you can’t search by bounding box yet but it’s functional.

Lots of updates went through today like the API now supports things like streets, tags (keys and values) are a more realistically handled. This brings the API to version 0.3

I spent the rest of the day fixing up the gps trace pane so you can add descriptions to your traces, tag them, and make them available for public download. Still some work to do, pending input from the mailing list.