Haiyan, part 2

Interestingly, the majority of Tacloban is now mapped, as well as many other areas.

Someone's run stats: 245 volunteers who created nearly 440,000 map changes within the aforementioned extent. It's now up to 600,000+

More exciting than that, however, is the sheer number of emergency responders using OpenStreetMap data.
For example; since we mapped just about every building in Tacloban, satellites have been redirected to capture updated images.
The two are being explicitly combined. You can see a really detailed map of what survived, and what did not:

http://emergency.copernicus.eu/mapping/ems-product-component/EMSR058_02TACLOBANCITY_GRADING_DETAIL03/1

You can also see a mashup of geotagged photos from reports on the ground, backed up by OSM tiles:
https://haiyan.crowdmap.com/

While we can't change the fact thousands have died, there's a quite reasonable hope that accurate, up to date geospatial information can change the situation; enabling people to prioritise with data driving decisions in both the immediate and longer term recovery efforts.

Geocoding, Google Earth and Work

So I'm pretty excited at the moment, as we're finally rolling out our geocoding extras for our work application, ValEx.

This means you can see any of the 3.6 million or more Australian addresses we know about in Google Earth; search by proximity; find comparible sales to your subject property; or see your appointments for the day.

Frankly, it's all kind of amazing.

However all of that was just swept from my mind by Google Earth is embeddable in your browser.

PhotoSynth, Seadragon, BeOS and Jef Raskin's THE

My friend James pointed to TED demo of seadragon/photosynth.

Think of it as a two part thing

• Seadragon is a rendering engine for images, which is really fast and only needs as much memory as your screen resolution needs


• PhotoSynth is automatic linking of images to make 3D models

Go and watch the demo if you have no idea what I just said.

There's a live demo too.

The interaction with SeaDragon reminded me of Jef Raskin's zooming user interface (8mb swf)

Pretty sweet.

I always wanted to build something like it, after playing with a photo+wireframing tool (It was like a poor man's google sketchup) when I was about 13. You'd get an image, draw a cube, and texture it, get another image, texture, hey presto, easy digital model. Unfortunately, adobe bought it and snuffed it, and I have no freakin' idea on how to build something like they have.

The performance of SeaDragon reminded me of a BeOS demo video - a lot of things going one at once.