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.

Metero Crater is the well-named meteor crater in Arizona created by a “nickel-iron meteorite about 50 meters (54 yards) across, which impacted the plain at a speed of several kilometers per second. The speed of the impact has been a subject of some debate. Modelling initially suggested that the meteorite struck at a speed of up to 20 kilometers per second (45,000 mph), but more recent research suggests the impact was substantially slower, at 12.8 kilometers per second (28,600 mph). It is believed that about half of the impactor’s 300,000 tonnes (330,000 short tons) bulk was vaporized during its descent, before it hit the ground.[7]”

I drove the 3 hours there, then 3 hours back to visit it from Phoenix, Arizona yesterday and took some pics:

And of course I mapped it. There are a bunch of footpaths, a subway fast food restaurant, lookout points and so on. Of course someone had already mapped the crater rim and the car park. Check out the map here.

Next year, we’ll be lathering on sunscreen and eating tapas at the 4th Annual State of the Map Conference in Girona, Spain on July 9th- July 11th, 2010.

Girona here we come!

You can keep up to date with what’s happening with the State of the Map (SOTM) here.

For information on our host city, visit the wiki and travel wiki.

Google is offering everything from certificates to ice cream to laptops in it’s mapping competition to help the world build the 3rd closed map. Interesting in that most stay away from offering incentives to map beyond good will because it can, and has, led to people entering vast amounts of copyrighted data for other companies that tried it.

Matt has an interesting post comparing Map Editors:

I’ve been playing with the changeset data for OpenStreetMap and looking to see what patterns I can find in the usage of various editors since changesets were introduced in the API 0.6 migration. We can start off just looking at the major editors by distinct users, i.e: everyone’s favourite popularity contest.

Mikel parachuted in to Kibera last month – a holiday destination known as the “second largest urban slum in Africa” – to make sure it’s all mapped. The results have been impressive:

It includes a website, map data of course and social media including twitter and interviews:

The press release is worth a read:

Kibera remains a blank spot on the Kenyan map, though it holds as many as one million inhabitants according to UN-HABITAT. Its limited health and water resources, traffic patterns, and housing layouts remain largely invisible to the outside world and to residents themselves. Though many organizations have collected data on Kibera, the information is not yet shared as a resource for all to use. Map Kibera will fill in this gap by producing free, open-source digital map data using the techniques of OpenStreetMap, a user-edited map of the world. The resulting information will be freely available to residents, NGOs, private companies, and others interested in working with and for Kibera.