Mapping Hacks

If you are vegetarian like me, you’ll see the inherent case for open geodata
posed by a site like Dave Rolsky’s VegGuide.Org. Dave, a long-time organizer of
vegetarian lunch-time BOFs at The Perl Conference and the
North American Yet Another Perl
Conference, recently wrote in to say that VegGuide.Org now uses our own Geo::Coder::US to search for vegetarian and
vegan […]

This hack combining google maps US with craigslist caught my eye from the del.icio.us feed. I actually quite liked this one; it gets nearer to the kind of public writability, and was described as “a taste of what the semantic web will do for you”. I have some niggles to do with how far the […]

I have been, i’ll confess, wilfully avoiding Google Maps UK since it was released. I imagined, fairly accurately, that it would depress me. Not so much the service in and of itself, but the critical reaction spawned in comparison with it, and the rueful reflections it provokes on the public quality of our own work […]

This was an insight offered by Alex Robinson and others at the Open Geodata Forum; why do we, as enthusiasts, citizens and consumers need the very highly accurate data which the Ordnance Survey prides itself on providing?

Working with GPS traces, Steve Coast’s maps at openstreetmap are only accurate to within 5 metres. But that’s perfectly […]

Last Thursday’s Forum on open geodata in central London went fascinatingly. The CTO of the Ordnance Survey attended, as did apparently the head of their PR department, and a cluster of GIS policy advisory professionals, and a veritable collective of UK open map hackers.
Further information including slides and a sound recording are provided. The Open […]

At least, it is now Available on Safari. Safari is an O’Reilly subscription service that provides access to O’Reilly (and selected other publishers) books online.

The deal is that you can pre-purchase your hard copy of Mapping Hacks
and read it Right Now! online via Safari.

It is so exciting it makes me want to have another […]

…We just have all kinds of people.
Clearly that is advice to live by. I wanted a new server to throw
into our 1/4 rack down at Hurricane Electric. I mean, Schuyler has
a machine in the rack, and he and I jointly have a machine in the
rack, but all those beautiful “U’s” were sitting empty, […]

Is a class at the Stanford University Digital Arts Center taught by
Amy Franceschini. She brings
in guests to rant about nifty things (next session they are looking
at wifi and building cantennas).
Through our friend Mike Liebhold I got the change to do my spiel.
Schuyler insists that I post my slides from the talk.
If you are daft […]

Sean Dodson’s latest article in the Guardian, entitled Get
Mapping, features the counterpoint between commercial and amateur (or
civil) cartography:

It is tempting to call it the march of amateur mapmakers: armed with cheap
satellite-tracking handsets, teams of civilian surveyors are out in the field
recording casual journeys and sharing geodata with each other to produce their
own maps. Their aim […]

Seems like Mikel’s been hacking on Google’s Ridefinder service, and
discovered that it can be used to infer patterns of street
geography in New York City. Now, if only they’d start a service like this
in London, we could call the Open Street
Map project half done already!