Haha. Looks like a lot of fun!

Don't really know the pros and cons myself. I know that git is super-fashionable these days.

Well according to the README "you might as well just sell your soul to Adobe" :-P

Yes. At the moment there's only one renderer which makes makes maps which look nice, and Mapnik has a reputation as a mysterious C++ black box with hideous stylesheet language built on a massive "enterprise" grade database. Developers are making progress at improving the ease of installation though (just recently actually) You can actually run it as a quite a lightweight thing rendering a localised tileset reading direct from osm.xml and using split out css style or spreadsheet formatted stylesheets. As much as anything else we need some good friendly tutorials on doing these things.

Other technology stacks are fun of course. I can't really take tiles@home seriously, but I do agree that other rendering systems written in other languages / using other data access methods could at least foster a bit of competition. So far nobody's really given Mapnik any good competition though. Maybe Kosmos comes close to Mapnik's antialiased non-text-overlapping goodness. Nobody pays much attention to poor old Kosmos because it's M$.NET

Mapnik is built on top of PostGIS, which is a "proper" spatially indexed database. The tile data servers idea is kind of a half-assed naive attempt at doing something similar. ...but as I say, different technology stacks are fun. I did play with OJW's tile data server and phprender (before it broke) I haven't looked at "Roma" much but I imagine if somebody bridged the gap from roma to Mapnik, that could be an interesting combo.

Wow! Just spotted your work on the Salvador map. That's great! I did a little mapping there bit back in 2007 when I went on holiday there. It's looking a lot better now!

There's a few rifts in the OpenStreetMap community concerning the tags proposal process and in particular it's seen as quite troublesome the way people get excited about making new tag proposals, so I'm afraid you may be stepping on a minefield with this (see my talk http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/2009/10/04/community-smoothness/ )

There was a discussion a few months about the idea of having big group discussions at the 'State Of The Map' conferences, where we could agree to some sweeping changes to tags. Your first proposal might come to pass under that kind of framework.

I set up a wiki page for the event: São Paulo Dec 2009 Mapping Party including your cake diagram!

Yes York itself is coming along very nicely these days, but looks like Copmanthorpe needs some work. Welcome!

Routing on devices, or routing online?

maps.cloudmade.com example

embedding routing on your site with Web Maps Lite

Hmmm. slight HTML slip-up there. lemme just close this crazy italicness

... Edgemaster! London OSM dates. Dont forget! Come along to geomob on Thu. they'll be a bunch of us there.

Thinking about pedestrian routing is just one of many level-of-detail type questions, all of them pointing in the direction of "map everything as an area", as the ultimate solution to all problems representing reality.

It's insane though. You realise that don't you? :-)

heh. You want to aim for a pub quiz? Usually we hit them by accident every now and then. Maybe we should go to the Island Queen in Angel again.

my NaviGPS is advertised as waterproof too, but managed to get some water inside it somehow while I was kayak mapping. I didn't attempt to disassemble it. I just left it with the battery flap open to dry it. After about a week it started working normally again, although the screen is permanently missing a row of pixels.

I saw an interesting comment here "Google Maps have recently introduced a mandatory reverse geocoding feature,...". Might explain what you're seeing. But you'd have to give us an example lat/lon.

Yep. This kind of thing does make copyright infringement easy. It's so easy you can do it by accident. As an OSM mapper I find I have to abstain from looking at this kind of site, because it's so enticing. Suddenly figuring out what's missing is a doddle.

In my opinion we should discourage people from running this kind of site, or at least discourage anyone who contributes to OSM from looking at them.

Excellent stuff Roger. The map looks amazing. Cheers me up on a Monday morning!

I had someone else emailing me expressing concern about these diary entries. Not sure Fake Liam123 is a particularly clear joke for those who haven't been following talk-gb

Internet booths hey? Well you could certainly place a node with internet_access=terminal. Maybe just add another tag note=booth. I'm not aware of a "booth" tag (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:booth=yes/no has been used but only a few times. There may be a better tag to use)

OpenAerialMap is offline these days. Hopefully it will come back at some point.

For London we have Yahoo coverage. See the UK yahoo coverage map. Within these areas there's absolutely no reason to be using landsat (much lower resolution)

It's a bit fiddly to set up the yahoo downloader for the WMSPlugin, but worth doing. Certainly all of the building sketching I am talking about here is based on Yahoo imagery not landsat, but basically for any kind of mapping in London you'd be missing out if you didn't set-up the yahoo imagery.

Yes layer could be a solution, but I think osmarender is better at handling layer tags than mapnik at the moment