Simon Willison’s Weblog

Map Maker for Developers. Tiles from Google’s Map Maker crowdsourcing effort are now available in the JS and static maps APIs on an opt-in basis. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here, but Google Map Maker seems like a big step backwards for open geographic data. People donate their mapping efforts to Google, who keep them—unlike OpenStreetMap, where the donated efforts are made available under a Creative Commons license.

# 9:05 am / creativecommons, crowdsourcing, google, googlemapmaker, google-maps-api, openstreetmap, staticmaps

Mapping with Isotype (via) I hadn’t heard of Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education), a beautiful pictographic language created in the 1930s. This Isotype-inspired atlas is pretty spectacular.

# 11:09 am / design, isotype, mapping

jQuery 1.3.2 release notes. Not just a bug fix—there are a number of subtle behaviour changes, including to the :visible/:hidden selectors and the appendTo/prependTo/*To family of methods. I strongly recommend testing and reviewing those changes before upgrading.

# 4:42 pm / javascript, jquery

Introducing the Karmic Koala, our mascot for Ubuntu 9.10 (via) Ubuntu 9.10 will have a strong focus on cloud computing, including tools for easily creating EC2 AMIs and Eucalyptus, an open-source system for running an EC2-compatible cloud in your own data centre.

# 5:19 pm / cloud-computing, ec2, eucalyptus, karmickoala, linux, mark-shuttleworth, ubuntu