Nestoria launches

Nestoria is a sweet UK-based tool for finding property. Not really what I’d usually mention on this blog but they’ve sponsored the initial work on mapstraction, which makes them very cool! You too should think this is cool because work like this allows more development of openstreetmap. I’ll let them explain why it’s a good idea:

Why does Nestoria sponsor Mapstraction? The past year internet users have benefited from an unprecedented level of innovation in online mapping. We’re interested in providing Nestoria users with the best possible user experience. Right now we think that means using Google maps. But in the future that might well mean using maps from someone else, perhaps even the open source mapping service being developed by OpenStreetMap. Mapstraction will give us the greatest flexibility to always provide you, the user, with a compelling mapping service.

OSM San Jose comparison

Interesting article from mikel: San Jose, largest city in Silicon Valley, is a rapidly sprawling suburban metropolis. This unsustainable mode of development is generally considered detrimental to open space, consumed by low density housing, energy resources, squandered on car dominated transportation, and community, split apart by satellite dishes and 6 lane roads. But what is bad for the environment is still brilliant for OpenStreetMap!

Podcast: reboot 8

Here is an un-edited, powerbook-recorded mp3 of my talk at reboot 8 in Copenhagen. Here is a PDF of the slides so you can follow along. If someone wants to edit out the ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ or link the slides in to a proper podcast with garageband for video ipods please do! 🙂 here is a mind map someone made and here is the reboot wiki page relating to the talk.

Travel Time Maps

MySociety have done some funded temporal travel maps which sort of follow on from Toms tube temporal maps. They interestingly put a veiled critique of the data access they had at the bottom:

‘Although the journey planning services and software we used were publicly accessibly, almost none of the other data is available unless you pay for it, or your work falls under an existing licencing agreement. So while we set out to demonstrate how easily we could make travel-time maps from public data, very little of this work could be cheaply reproduced or extended without assistance from a government department.

That’s unfortunate, because it means that innovative work by outsiders in this area can only go ahead if it’s explicitly sponsored by government. If all the data we’ve used had been available for free, somebody else might well have done what we’ve done years ago, with no cost to the taxpayer. We’d love it if others extend the work that we’ve done, but realistically there aren’t very many people in a position to do this cheaply.’

I guess they can’t bite the hand that feeds them too hard! 🙂