Mapping Hacks

I hear from Tracey P. Lauriault of the launch of the Civic Access project. This is a Canadian effort whose full title is Citizens for Open Access to Civic Information and Data. I like the pragmatic nature of their mission:
Encourage institutions to share data, start a working group to build technologies that make data accessible, […]

I had a table at the Maker Faire this last weekend. It was lots and lots of fun, loads of friends were there, and lots of interesting people to talk with. I brought in a couple of catapults that spencer and I built, and let folks shoot ping pong balls at the Yahoo booth directly […]

Kiran Jonnalagadda sent out an email about ’super high resolution maps of language
distribution around the world.’
The maps are very cool-check it out! The India PDF map is 30/16.5 MB (site
says 30, download manager 16.5). They’re designed to be printed 36″
or wider. Data table and ArcGIS files also available.
http://www.gmi.org/wlms/users/huffman/
Dr. Huffman has classified the languages of […]

Quite a few of Mapping Hacks’ friends and contributors are on the speaker list at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference this year. When this year’s Where was first announced, I was uninspired by the strapline, “Where’s the Value?”; the ORA organisers have since done a fair bit to change the tone, and re-emphasise open source and […]

Yesterday, Tim O’Reilly emailed us to ask the following:
Any thoughts about the relative openness and hacker-friendliness of the Google Maps API vs. the Yahoo! or Microsoft APIs?
My response ran something like this:
Early on — i.e. last summer — there was a huge gap between Google Maps and the rest. In particular, Google offered a JavaScript […]