Later this week, I will performing a very important ceremony. After this - we’re off on an adventure to the land of Kiwis, Mountains & Dwarves (or somesuch).

Of course, this is a bright time in online tourism. There are a lot of resources out there for travelers who want to find out more about destinations and share their travels.

Over the next couple of days I’ll be reviewing some of the excellent New Zealand travel resources we used to plan our trip and of course arm ourselves with all the necessary mapping and neogeography tools.

Of course, I’ll be posting geotagged photos to Flickr, and using GeoPress in my Travel Blog.

Here is a quick list of basic travel sites for gathering & sharing travel stories:

• TripHub - Easily plan and organize your trip for free
• MapSack - Travel in the Know
• TripTracker
• GeekyTraveller
• World66 & WikiTravel
• TravelBlog - GlobeTrotting Documented
• Gusto - travel + lifestyle
• TrekEarth - Learning about the world through photography

Steve Coast announced that OSM now has Yahoo’s Satellite imagery. This is incredible news, as there is a tremendous amount of data and imagery that would be too difficult/expensive to obtain with out the support of a company like Yahoo. Steve shows off an applet that automatically generates streets from the imagery. Geobloggers (Dan Catt) has some thoughts on how this really helps the cause and experience of the open-mapping front.

He mentions the “Here be Dragons” experience of people really wanting to go out there and find the unmapped places. This is how OSM really got off the ground in the first place, as most of the world was “Dragon-land” and everyone’s individual contribution made a huge difference, at least in the UK/Europe.

Data as good and bad

The US still doesn’t have great OSM representation. One response I’ve heard from the OSM crowd is, “the US already has TIGER/Line data, so there’s less impetus for people to go out and contribute new data”. There were very few “unknown areas”, so people found less benefit to put effort into adding those few places. Now, with Yahoo’s imagery & an applet to automatically generate roads, will there be the same effect in the UK/Europe? Nearly overnight the amount of mapped areas with dramatically increase with little to no effort by the actual mappers. While their efforts made OSM what it is, and therefore made it possible and useful for Yahoo to give the imagery, I wonder if they’ll now feel they’ve partly “lost their voice”?

Will looking at the next generation OSM map and seeing 90% coverage make the developers/gatherers more apathetic about setting up mapping parties? What happens when you go from the underdog to the superdog? Google is dealing fairly well with it - they spend a lot of effort to seem like a “small company” - but when you have an open call to hire more than 150 engineers, you’re not small.

Bring out your users… <dong>

What this data definitely will do is bring more users to the project, whereas before there were mostly devs/contributors, and very few users. We’ve already seen some of the first commercial uses of OSM data, albeit for very specific locations. With more data, better coverage more developers can use OSM data for their projects. And perhaps we’ll even see people able to load the data into their GPS receivers or nav systems and use them as their primary mapping source.

Having users is a whole different set of issues than what OSM has dealt with in the past. Part of the growing pains is dealing with a quick increase in the community size which can affect the quality of data, reduction in a feeling of ‘community’, and also just dealing with common issues, support, and questions from new people as they start flooding in.

Simple Inspirational

The primary contributors to OSM have been in Europe, and they’ll probably have the largest change from development to users. European contributors will have to deal with the possibility loss of identity that they had with OSM as a grass-roots organization and helping shape it as a larger, more stable entity.

But another benefit of this huge surge in usefulness and visibility of OSM is that it should inspire contribution and development around the world. It can spur users in Asia, New Zealand, Africa, and South America what the power and purpose can be in contributing new data. They’ll now see OSM not just as a bunch of geeks “over in Europe” running around with GPS units, but a solid, useful, system where they can contribute to and really use this new data and services.

Of course, all this will still take some time. OSM just got the imagery, and they’re still working out the bugs and features of the applet to convert the images to real street data. But it’s definitely a turning point in the open-geodata front, one that will cause quite a bit of excitement.

And good luck conquering the last of the dragon-lands.

It’s quite the big week for cool technology getting a lot of limelight. Today Nestoria demonstrated that they’re using OpenStreetMaps to display some of their properties.

The quality of the resulting maps from data gathered by “people on bikes” is rather incredible. Granted, the maps are currently mostly used around places like the Isle of Wight that have super-good coverage due to the enviously fun mapping parties.

It’s interesting in that a very commercial site is using and supporting an open-initiative to gather free geodata and finds it high enough quality to use for selling high-priced items to customers. So instead of paying continual royalties to large mapping suppliers, or dealing with possibly incompatible (or variable) terms of service, companies can help guide and support open-source projects with the desired functionality, and get to use the resulting products in a much more amenable manner.

And to give them extra-special open-source goodness, Nestoria supported the development of Mapstraction, the free and open-source “cross-mapping” javascript library that is used in GeoPress.

Honda is showing off a new GPS with weather info and social networking system (via Engadget). This is a lot like Goole & Volkswagon’s proposed nav system.

What is really exciting is the ability to load up personal POI. For example, I am going on a road trip and want to get all my favorite restaurants, WiFi locations, friends’ houses, and hiking trails for Michigan and sourthern Canada. This could be a GPX file, or GeoRSS feed from Mapufacture.

The Garmin Nuvi supports this using their POI Loader, which will take a GPX or CSV file and load it onto our GPS. The Nuvi looks really great, but is an external solution. Built-in navigation systems offer better integration into the interior and usually better sensors. For example, my Prius (Akius) has in-wheel hub sensors for integrating distance traveled when GPS isn’t available. Now if only the in-car navigation systems (which cost a bundle more, on an order of magnitude) offered similar functionality, upgradeability, and best of all: hackability.

Mobile GIS is becoming more interesting and easy to get into. Yesterday Navicore released their navigation software for the Nokia 770.

Maemo Mapper is a free and open-source mapping application, designed from the ground-up for the Nokia 770. However, a large caveat is that it uses GoogleMaps in what is probably a violation of the terms of service (realtime navigation and downloading), not to mention annoying in that you have to “pre-drive” your route to cache the appropriate GoogleMap tiles.

GPSDrive now supports OpenStreetMap for downloading free maps.

I’ve gotten slightly involved in the new GeoClue project - an effort to provide an easy “location service” backend for devices. The location on the device may be served up by GPS, WiFi, GeoIP, Mobile Cell/GSM, or even just the user clicking on a map or entering an address. Then, an application can subscribe to the location service and get updated with the current location of the user/device and use it as appropriate.

At FOSS4G I attended a BOF (Birds of a Feather - people interested in the same stuff) on Mobile GIS. The software and technology all exist, it just needs some coordinated efforts to define the use cases, interfaces, and approaches. However, one solution won’t fit everyone. There are users who want to do “real GIS” in the field and there are users who want to do “neogeography” to say, find the nearest coffee shop on their mobile.