MapForums

...and boy are my arms tired. but at least I was able to capture some fabulous DIY aerial imagery along the way.

If that isn't funny to you, you probably weren't in Burlingame for the Where Conference this week. Chris Anderson showed off his unmanned drone built from toys and readily available off-the-shelf components. Completed with a camera phone that accepted remote commands via SMS and captured aerial photos, he had a DIY aerials capture system for well under a thousand bucks. On the same theme, on Tuesday Pict'Earth showed what they are doing to enable all of us to create our own layers of aerial imagery. Both were very thought provoking and inspirational presentations and definitely among the highlights of the event.

Leading the list of low-lights had to be Jeremy Bartley getting a vaudevillian hook after 5 minutes that would have embarrassed even Henny Youngman. I though the allotment of 5 minutes in the schedule was a typo, but sadly it wasn't. Has reality TV eroded our collective attention span to the point where 5 minutes of thinking is all we can handle?*

Other impressive presenters included Skyhook's Ryan Sarver on standardizing a Geolocation API for browser based apps and Adrian Holovaty from Everyblock. Oh! and going back to Monday, Steve Coast's deep dive on Open Street Map was my favorite session of the 3 days. Lots of great insight into the current state of the OSM project in a well paced entertaining presentation. If you aren't familiar with OSM, take a few minutes to poke around on the website and learn a little about what i see as one of the most ambitious mapping efforts ever - to create a freely available street level map of the entire world.

Two Henny Youngman references in one post. not bad. Actually, I'm not 100% sure that the "I just flew in..." joke originated with him. Anyone have a definitive citation of the source?