I managed to write a diary entry about the bloomsbury meet-up without including this cheesey photo of Ollie. He probably thought he'd got away with it, but no! This diary entry is dedicated to Ollie O'Brien :-)

Here's Ollie in a Nike Grid T-Shirt, and with a Nike Grid poster, featuring OSM maps! Properly attributed this time (or be it the smallest attribution ever). Nike Grid (nikegrid.com) is an game/sport thing involving running around between phone boxes. It's done in a funked up urban nike kind of way, but it resembles orienteering.

...which is one of Ollie's passions. In fact he is the creator of OpenOrienteeringMap, a custom rendering of OpenStreetMap in the funny pumpkin coloured style that orienteers go for.

That was a creation from earlier this year, but Ollie's blog is stuffed full of other visualisations and OpenStreetMap goodness. In fact I hadn't realised how prolific he's been until I took another look just now

#geomob

Ollie's more recent attention-grabbing creations have been about the cycle hire scheme in London, and others around the world, and it was this that he presented at #geomob last week, along with some fascinating follow-up analysis on how the systems balance out (slides)

There were some other great presentations, but Ollie was doing the most interesting stuff with OpenStreetMap, and I like to think that OSM helped him steal the show. There was some other nice OSMness in some of Matthew Watkin's Chromaroma slides.

If you're looking for a more exhaustive commentary on the presentations at #geomob have a read of puntofisso's blog post

I also liked Ed Freyfogle's closing statement: (In an earnest professorial tone) "and now we move on to the drinking part of the evening". Thanks to Ed for getting #geomob started again. It's the second most important geo meet-up event in London! Check it out at geomobldn.org and sign up to the February geomob.

(Of course the most important geo meet-up is happening again on Thursday!)