Well yes. That may have had something to do with it :-) I didn't get paid any overtime for a full on evening of mapping, promoting OpenStreetMap at the pub, and then going and inputting the map data... but hey, it is the kind of thing I do for fun!

Yeah. We need a larger army of contributors! The army is getting larger though.

Also updating nodes is much less technical than dealing with ways, so I'm hopeful that we might see fly-by contributions from local people to do simple POI updates, but some more dedicated OSMers will probably need to work on getting the POIs in there in the first place!

This weekend I went to a couple of those rivers in Wales you've been mapping. Got GPS traces in my kayak!

JOSM can now fetch Yahoo! Imagery using the 'WMS' plugin (not the 'YMWS' plugin) The installation steps are documented, but maybe not very clearly. I'll write down my experiences with view to adding this info somewhere on the wiki:

For windows you need to download webkit-image, unzip it, and move the contents so that the DLL files and the EXE file are somewhere "on your system path". The best way to achieve this might be to place them alongside josm-latest.jar Keep the 'imageformats' subfolder alongside too, so all the contents of the zip
Then restart JOSM and do 'WMS' menu -> YAHOO (Webkit).

The new behaviour of the WMS plugin (which is not yet documented), is that it dynamically fetches tiles of the background layer, as you scroll around in JOSM. Now I'm not sure how exactly this works, but you may need to be at a good imagery viewing zoom level (e.g. position the zoom level such that scale in the top left says ~150m)

...and then you wait. In my experience it can take up to 30 seconds for any imagery to appear. I don't know whether this delay is to do with the speed of yahoo serving the tiles, some delay initialising/running webkit, or a deliberate delay as part of the logic for deciding when and where to fetch tiles. If nothing appears after a minute, then it maybe isn't finding those DLL files correctly.

In my experience Potlatch has always been quite good at fetching Yahoo imagery. Of course you need to tell it do so (3rd icon at the bottom) and there can be a delay of 10 seconds or so before it shows any imagery, perhaps worsened by a slow internet connection, but apart from that I'm not sure why you might be having problems.

Heh. Yeah I've steered clear of the Beginners Guide for a long time because there's lots of awkward duplication and general mess in there, but I guess there is a demand for one-stop sequential guide. Pondering ways of improving it... but slash and burn is tempting

Don't worry I'm going to edit the beginners guide myself some time soon, and my ideas for JOSM UI tweaks I guess I should add as JOSM trac tickets

This time last year I used NPE a few times via WMS plugin. It was obvious to me at the time that the images were wonky, but it still came in handy as a sanity check / get my bearings within JOSM. Would be nice to have this within JOSM again some time (the better rectified images)

I have an older installation of JOSM (and WMS plugin) where the wonky NPE maps do still work. That's pointing at
http://nick.dev.openstreetmap.org/openpaths/freemap.php?layers=npe&

But there's been some changes to the WMS plugin.

People *purely* tracing over yahoo imagery isn't really "mapping" at all. It's sketching. A minor contribution. It's easy to whack in some lines. It's difficult to be sure you're getting it right. It's impossible to arrive at a finished map (can't see street names or bollards for starters)

But my normal approach is
1) Sketch an area from yahoo imagery first (or more commonly work in an area where someone's already done it)
2) Use a GPS + take photos while surveying
3) Use JOSM photo mapping features and YWMS plugin while putting in the data.

In ares without yahoo imagery coverage I can't do step 1 and step 3 feels a lot less accurate. But then I probably just need to do step 2 more seriously, rather then just casually strolling down a main road taking snaps of the side-roads, as I was on this occasion.

That's excellent! I've just updated the Sao Paulo wiki page with a user visualization which shows your spectacular surveying work!

Woosh! You recently mapped out a massive area of Sao Paulo! Did you survey all of those streets yourself??

Oh Sorry to hear that Jenny! I was worried something like that might happen. Shaun wrote 6p.m. on the upcoming.org page but I didn't get there till about 6:45 due to train delays out of London Bridge... and then Shaun and Steven arrived even later.

We sat in The Marquis of Granby, probably till about 7:30, with a map on the table (I usually try to have a map or a GPS unit out, to help people find us) ...But then we moved on to the Hobgoblin because it didn't do food ...and we foolishly assumed nobody else was coming.

So I don't know if you were there before or after us. Bummer!

I remember Brugg. I used to live in Baden (3 or 4 years back). I kept falling asleep on the train home from Zurich and waking up in Brugg.

These places are all looking great on the map now. Amazing progress on OSM since I last looked there about a year ago!

Aha pub mapping. This is important!

Well we have https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity=nightclub too.

...but in some cases you'll have to make a judgement in deciding between the two. Similar problem for cafes vs restaurants.

There's various other tags you might think about for pubs. I guess cuisine=english (or something) for those that do food. And https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:wifi=free now shows up on http://www.opencyclemap.org/ . Not sure what we're doing about outdoor seating capacity. Seems like an important thing to record, but I've been just whacking this info in a note. "amenity=biergarten" is valid apparently (just big german style biergartens?)

Show only English pages? No but we might have this soon via the wiki namespaces mechanism. See Talk:Wiki#multilingual ability. Note that german language pages are mostly talking about german places. Perhaps the real problem is not the language, but the wiki pages about places all over the world which don't really interest you. Personally I make very extensive use of my "watchlist". I basically watch every page of the wiki apart from the pages about places!

It would take time write the words of a mailing list weekly digest, but the time spent reading all the emails is probably the big thing... and that's time that a lot of people do actually spend anyway. Just need one of those people to do the writing bit (Doesn't have to be the same person every week)

Land-on-the-left sorry Land-on-the-left! You've got me confused now.

By the way, another lesser known rule is that the way should (ideally) be positioned at the average high tide line. In most places we don't manage to follow this though, because most places are based on PGS import or Yahoo aerial imagery.

hehe@donald. You know you could actually walk with your GPS in the other direction. It's only the 'way' arrows which need to be 'water-on-the-left' :-)

"Carribean Scene" hey? Very nice. So I'll see you there around 8!

I'm a little suspicious of the yahoo imagery in my slice number 18 of the cake. Is it really still industrial wasteland here on the riverfront? Oh well... soon find out!

Well I'd looked at Wembley stadium before actually (here) It's been on there a while. I was noticing that google maps shows nothing there. tee hee.

...however we've got a trace from the OLD Wembley stadium (show in the old Yahoo Aerial Imagery), so somebody needs to figure out where the exact outline of Wembley stadium is too, because the new one is bigger I think.

I put a brief description of CartType (and link) on the a new wiki page, just as a placeholder really to help people find it.

You describe it as a "micro" mapping party, but actually six people is not a bad turn out at all. Bit more promotion, and you might have a big event your hands!

Writing down street names does slow things down while you're out surveying. You should give Photo Mapping a try!