Big news in the geosphere today, Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap and Cloudmade has joined Microsoft's Bing division, and Bing are making their aerial imagery available to the OpenStreetMap community.

ReadWriteWeb's take on the announcement is here, and James Fee weighs in with a typically insightful post here.

Why is this new imagery a big deal?  Because it is fantastically detailed in many areas.  OpenStreetMap struck a deal with Yahoo Maps a number of years ago that allows OSM editors to trace features off Yahoo-sourced imagery without having to worry about copyright and derived data issues. However the Yahoo imagery hasn't been updated for a number of years, and is quite low resolution. Where available, the Bing imagery will prove much more useful for editors.

Lets look at The Irish Museum for Modern Art (IMMA), for example. The current Yahoo image for the area, at maximum zoom, looks like this:

Here in Ireland the police (Garda Síochána) have outsourced the enforcement of speeding laws to a private company.  This company will operate 45 mobile speed cameras and the zones in which these cameras will operate has been publicised in advance by the Gardaí on their website here: http://www.garda.ie/Controller.aspx?Page=6497

Obviously that site has attracted a lot of attention and has been unavailable for much of the weekend.  However if you dig through the page source code you can see a direct link to the .kml file which shows where the zones are.

If you download the .kml file you can open it with Google Earth on your computer, or you can roll your own Google Map by using the 'My Maps' feature in Google Maps but the simplest thing to do is just open Google Maps and paste the URL below into the Search Box:

http://www.garda.ie/sez/gardagosafecameras.kml

You can see my map here:

View Larger Map

Alternatively you can see the map on The Journal here: http://www.thejournal.ie/rush-to-check-speed-cameras-crashes-garda-website-2010-11/

Earlier today Noel Ballantyne tweeted me to day to let me know that Google had updated some of their imagery in Ireland, and he noticed something unusual in Portlaoise:

@mickmel @ManAboutCouch also portloaise with prison excludedOct 5 2007

— Noel Ballantyne (@NoelBallantyne) October 19, 2010

This imagery isn't available in Google Maps yet, here's what it looks like in Google Earth:

Strange how the prison is missing from the new image, and only older imagery is used.  Noel mentioned that the prison was undergoing some renovation work at the time the second image was taken, but while the site may have looked like a building site, there is no reason for it to have been removed from the image. Unless removal was specifically requested perhaps?

A later image of Mountjoy Jail in Dublin shows no such sign of censorship:

It seems to me that something strange is going on. Now where's my tin hat?

UPDATE: Noel also noticed that the prison is missing from recently updated OSi mapping, but isn't obscured in the 2005 Orthophotos:

http://maps.osi.ie/publicviewer/#V1,647780,698898,6

Following on from my FourSquare post below, there are a couple of interesting sites that allow you to viaulise your FourSquare checkin history on a map.

Where Do You Go generates a Heat Map of your checkin history.  Here's mine:

Another type of visualisation can be seen on Weeplaces which looks very impressive (it uses OpenStreetMap mapping too) The site traces lines between each day's checkins, allowing you to visualise your movements for your entire checkin history or use the sliders to select a shorter time period, right down to a single day. The output looks something like this:

You can see my checkin history on Weeplaces here. Nice! 

I've been using FourSquare for a few months now, I'm interested in it primarily because it uses an interesting method for gathering geographic data (or POI's): the addition of a gaming element i.e. rewarding users for adding venues and frequenting places with points, badges and 'Mayorships'

This is in contrast to the crowdsourcing element used by OpenStreetMap which is perhaps more altruistic, offering only the satisfaction that comes from making an excellent map a fraction better.

I have been wondering recently about the number of users that FourSquare has in Ireland. The service has reportedly hit 3 million users globally. The service's API has rate limits which restricts the download of POI information, and currently there is no way to extract information about the number of users in a particular country. (If you find a way to generate this information please let me know)

Last Saturday night I was at Lansdowne Road for the Leinster v Munster Rugby Match.

Aviva Stadium  Lansdowne Road

I checked in on FourSquare and noted that 56 other people had done likewise. The attendance at the match was reported as 50,645 (a record for a Magners League Match) Even allowing for the fact that the crowd at the match might not be entirely representative of the nation (certainly not with tickets priced at Eur50 and up) it is indicative of the penetration level of the service.  If we extrapolate the 0.1% checkin rate to the entire population of Ireland we arrive at an estimated total of 4,500 users in Ireland. The real number is probably significantly lower than that, as the matchgoing demographic almost certainly has higher than average levels of smartphone penetration and interest in social networking than the population as a whole.

It'll be interesting to compare these numbers with upcoming Soccer Internationals and Heineken Cup / Six Nations matches in Lansdowne (Anybody got spare tickets for those? ;-)

As an aside, how many checkins are these users performing?  I travelled to Cork at the end of July and noted that Heuston Station had 1,100 checkins at the time. As of today, 10 weeks later, that number is now 1,552, which works out at about 40 checkins per week in this venue, which is a popular one on FourSquare.

And which is Ireland's most checked-into venue? I think it might be Dublin Airport, with 4,177 checkins.

You can see my FourSquare page here: http://foursquare.com/user/manaboutcouch

GeoFabrik are German OpenStreetMap specialists, and they provide some very useful data and tools for those who work with, or are interested in OpenStreetMap (OSM).

I frequently download Shapefiles of OSM data from their servers, you can get your hands on them here: http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/

Recently I've been playing with one of their Lab products: OSM History and have generated an animated .gif of the progress of OSM in Ireland, from it's beginning in April 2006 (when there were less than 7,000 nodes on the map) up to August 2010 (when the map had more than 1.8 million nodes) Here it is:

If the animation doesn't work, you can see the original here

Impressive, eh?

I've been playing around with GeoCommons (www.geocommons.com) and have built my first map. It's the Irish Electoral Boundaries from 2004 (which has since been superseded of course)

http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/25148

Be prepared to wait though, the site seems to be pretty slow. To be fair, the Shapefile I used is over 4MB, which is quite big.

Inspired by the very funny maps of stereotypical views of Europe posted here: http://alphadesigner.com/project-mapping-stereotypes.html

I've thrown together an Irish version:

As mentioned in my post below on InfoVis I'm an enthusiastic reader of RSS feeds supplied by a range of sites/blogs.  My Google Reader profile is here.  In addition to feeds about InfoVis I also read a number of blogs centered around GIS / neogeography / mapping and data.

CreativeCommons Image by HeyPaul on Flickr

Here are a few selected blogs that I find interesting / useful in those fields:

Maps & Mapping:

Ordnance Survey GB Blog It would be nice to see OSi doing some blogging too. There's a lot going on in OSi and I don't think this is effectively communicated to the wider public at present.

Cartogrammar Blog Andy Woodruff posts about cartography.

Google's Lat-Long Blog Official blog from Google's Geo team.

OpenGeoData Open Data, Open Maps and OpenStreetMap.

The Map Room Jonathan Crowe's links to and thoughts on maps and map collections, old and new.

Strange Maps Wonderful collection of the strange and interesting in map form.

Suprageography from Oliver O'Brien, who blogs about information visualisation in map form.

ESRI Ireland Primarily of Irish interest, some thoughts from the team at ESRI Ireland

Some Key Thinkers:

Ed Parsons of Google: http://www.edparsons.com/

Gary Gale of Nokia: http://www.vicchi.org/

Spatially Adjusted by James Fee of WeoGeo: http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/

Peter Batty of Ubisense: http://geothought.blogspot.com/

Muki Haklay of UCL: http://povesham.wordpress.com/

Thierry Gregorius of Landmark Information Group: http://georeferenced.wordpress.com/

Geo news aggregators

All Points Blog from Directions Magazine

SlashGeo

GIS Lounge

You can see the full list of RSS sources which I've flagged with 'Geo' here.

In addition, for Irish viewers there are a number of other sources of information / networking opportunities. These include

Spatial Ireland on LinkedIn and Twitter

IRLOGI which is the representative group for the Irish Geographic Information industry.

IrelandAfterNAMA is an excellent blog about the impact of the current economic crisis in Ireland, from a geographical and economic viewpoint.

Mark Foley of DIT maintains a list of resources which should be of interest to both Irish and International GI professionals

If there are other sites / resources out there which you think I should add to the list above I'd be delighted to hear from you.

Shawn Allen (of http://www.stamen.com) is teaching a course on Information Visualisation. The course intro is an excellent overview of the history of the discipline: http://interactiondesign.sva.edu/classes/datavisualization/2010/07/08/introduction/ Also keep an eye on the 'Updates' section of the course blog: http://interactiondesign.sva.edu/classes/datavisualization/updates/

Some sources of interesting visualisations / discussion:

Infosthetics - http://infosthetics.com/

Nicholas Feltron (of http://www.feltron.com) has a Tumblr here: http://feltron.tumblr.com/ He's famous for his Annual Reports: http://feltron.com/index.php?/content/2009_annual_report/

Flowing Data: http://flowingdata.com/

David McCandless - Information is Beautiful: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ David does a bit of work with the Guardian Data Blog team: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog

Datavisualisation.ch - http://datavisualization.ch/

Strange Maps - http://bigthink.com/blogs/strange-maps

I also put interesting maps I have created on my Flickr () and on my site: http://www.geographic.ie