Four short links: 6 July 2009

iPhone Maps, Tooth Milling, Scratch Updated, Newspapers for All

1. Offline Mapping App for iPhone -- carry Open Street Maps maps with you even when you're not in 3G/wifi range. (via Elisabeth)
2. My dentist used an in-office CAD & CNC mill to produce a new tooth for me today (Nat Friedman) -- hello, future!
3. New version of Scratch released -- Scratch is an excellent way to teach kids how to program (I've had success with lots of 7 and 8 year olds). The new version includes keyboard entry, webcams, and support for Lego WeDo. The user interface has also been changed to work on a Netbook's 800x600 screen. Kudos to the Scratch team! (via scratchteam on Twitter)
4. Newspaper Club - a Work in Progress -- blog for the Newspaper Club project. "We're building a service to help people make their own newspapers. This is the blog where we're alarmingly honest about where it's all going wrong." I can't figure out whether this is a brilliant decentralisation move that will disrupt the newspaper industry, or a paper form of steampunk. (via Simon Willison)

Want a Map of Tehran? Use Open Street Map or Google

All eyes are on Tehran right now. As the center of the Iranian election protests the city has become increasingly important to websites this week. To keep their site up-to-date with this latest crisis area Flickr switched out the Yahoo road Map with Open Street Map. When I heard about this I wondered how other major mapping sites faired.

So I examined the road and satellite maps of Yahoo, Mapquest, Google, and Bing (formerly Live Maps). Looking at the images below it becomes very clear that user-generated maps win in hard to reach places. Both Open Street Map (above) and Google (below) rely on user-contributions. Open Street Map relies almost entirely on user uploaded GPS tracks for its mapping data across the world. After the jump i've included the satellite maps from each service (except for Mapquest who did not have them). They were

Google is using data acquired from their just-under-a-year-old Mapmaker program (Radar post). With Mapmaker users can add roads, POIs, regions and features. It's a very powerful tool that has greatly expanded Google coverage. Google has been slow and deliberate in using Mapmaker data on their main site. In fact it was just a couple of weeks ago that Iran's mapmaker data "graduated" to the main site. There are now 64 countries on Google that have been updated with Mapmaker data.

This isn't the first time Flickr has done this (Radar post). They've also used Open Street Map for Beijing, Black Rock City (2008), Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Baghdad, Kabul, Kinshasa, Mogadishu, Harare, Nairobi, Accra, Cairo, and Algiers.

So what's holding back Microsoft, Yahoo and Mapquest? Unknown, but hopefully they'll realize that their top-down approach isn't working.

Compare the Maps for yourself:
Note: I have included data layers where they were available (Google and Microsoft).

Google Maps:

(The markers include Wikipedia articles, photos, video, webcams, POIs, and public transit stations)

(The markers include Photosynths, user collections, photos and Wikipedia articles)

Yahoo Maps:

Mapquest Maps:

(This took a while to find, I had to find the International Maps page and click-thru a couple more pages to get the map)

(continue reading)

DisasterTech from Where2.0

I was honored to speak with Mikel Maron at Where2.0 about innovation in Disaster Technology, a topic that is extremely important to me. Here is the video:

This talk covers the ongoing efforts of: World Shelters, the UN Joint Logistics Centre, Humanitarian.info, InSTEDD, and Humanlink.

You can read about the development of SMS GeoChat, the Sahana effort for Burma/Myanmar (Radar post), and the Mesh4x KML sync engine on Eduardo Jezierski's blog and on Jon Thompson's Aid Worker Daily.