I remembered my favourite town so far in OpenStreetMap, it’s Grenoble in France. Again, the product of dedicated hands unknown, this time it’s worth clicking in for a closer look…
Open Birmingham Map, and more
Over the last few months, whilst our developer eyes were on raw data for London, REST APIs, AJAX, new applets and stuff, a few enterprising souls have actually been mapping their home towns in the West Midlands and stress-testing the OpenStreetMap software with impressive and surprising dedication.
Apart from that, they (and others) have also been filling in Britain’s motorways (both carriages!) including the M25 and all its major junctions.
This post serves as a quick thanks to these folks (especially Alex, Andy and Simon – if I missed you, let me know) who’ve taken the time and effort to do all this work, and a promise from me and the other developers that extra tools (such as street names – a high priority) are on their way soon, along with a few more sensible ways to get your data back out again (we’re looking at various vector formats) and a few things to make your editing lives easier.
Keep it up folks, and do let us know if there are other areas being mapped with such care and attention. I know that Lars keeps a gazetteer on his wiki page, and I’m also aware of Portsmouth and Bristol being filled out nicely, so I’ll try and find some more inspriational areas soon.
OSM downtime
OpenStreetMap has had a couple of server problems over the past few days with a debian upgrade breaking the server. This is now fixed.
Posters and wallapapers
We have some superb desktop wallpapers for download and also posters for sale at a £10 + p&p. Click the image for more pictures and details:
Maps that Lye
This is a tiny scan from an A-Z map of central Bristol:
Only if you go and wander around Canynge Square in Bristol you see some nice houses where that Close should be:
Lye Close isn’t in the index either. Weird, huh? Well, not really. It’s an easter egg, a surprise street inserted so that if you attempt to copy the map then then the copyright holder can prove you copied it. Otherwise, why would you have the nonsense street in your map if you didn’t get it from them?
Fake street features are fairly hard to find, and we really have no idea how many there are. Fake streets, purpose mis-spellings and phantom churches are all thought to exist. It’s why OpenStreetMap asks you not to refence maps when entering data, and it’s one reason why we need our own free and accurate geodata.
With thanks to Laurence and Jo for scans and pictures.
Pledge for victory
After the successful pledge where people signed Jo’s minifesto and gave 10 pounds to support open geodata we have another pledge for you: “I will enter the location (coordinates from my GPS) and postcode of every place I visit (house, pub, shop..) to freethepostcode.org for a week but only if 10 other people will too.” Sign up here!
WSFII
There is a good lineup at the WSFII in London on the Saturday 1st & Sunday 2nd of October. I’ll be speaking there, at least.
New Applet
Tom has written a whizzy new applet that I’ve put up to replace the horrid old one.
OSM 1 year Party
___ ____ __ __ ____ _ _ ___ / _ / ___|| / | | _ __ _ _ __| |_ _ _ / | / _ | | | ___ | |/| | | |_) / _` | '__| __| | | | | || | | | | |_| |___) | | | | | __/ (_| | | | |_| |_| | | || |_| | ___/|____/|_| |_| |_| __,_|_| __|__, | |_(_)___/ |___/
Yes, its coming up to the one year anniversary of the arbitrarily chosen
domain registration timestamp! Fire up whois and behold 09-Aug-2004
18:47:25 UTC.
What: OSM Party 1.0. Beer then food by popular vote (Brick Lane?) Good
company, beer and mapping conversation. Special event at 18:47:25!
When: 9th Aug 2005, 6pm onward
Where: Strongroom Bar, 120-124 Curtain Road, LONDON, EC2A 3SQ
Reminder will be sent at one week and at one day beforehand.
