These images are part of an animation showing edits to the OpenStreetMap.org project during 2008. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world and this animation displays a white flash each time a way is entered or updated. Some edits are a result of a physical local survey by a contributor with a GPS unit and taking notes, other edits are done remotely using aerial photography or out-of-copyright maps, and some are bulk imports of official data.

OpenStreetMap started in 2004 and the rate of contributions is accelerating with four times as many people contributing to the project in 2008 compared to 2007. During the year, edits were made by some 20,000 individuals and there were bulk imports of data for many places, including the USA, India, Italy and Belarus which are clearly visible in the animation.

The first image shows the recent bulk import of data from Belarus and plenty of work going on in Spain, Finland and England in July 2008. Notice also the burst of activity Ireland during the State of the Map conference which took place in Limerick in July. Germany is, as always, glowing brightly. The second image shows major contributors (represented by different colors) to OpenStreetMap in the bay area of California.

This animation...

Daniel McLaren has built a Facebook friends visualization using his own flash-based graph visualization tool called Constellation. The interface lets you see which of your friends know each other. At any given time it will show one of your friends as the selected node (in bold), and any mutual friends as additional nodes. Lines between nodes represent friendships. Clicking a node will select it and you and the new person's mutual friends will appear. Finally, the colour of the circles represents gender: yellow is female, purple is male, and grey is unknown.

The information cannot be retrieved all at once so you'll find that the visualization will constantly change as more information comes in. It takes a while to load the data but it (usually) gets more interesting the longer you wait. Watching the nodes re-arrange themselves is fun, but also processor-heavy. If you have a lot of friends the CPU load will be pretty high.

The goal of City Murmur is to show how the media differently describes the urban space through the attention that is given to each street of a city. In the hypothesis of the increasing importance of the online presence in contemporary society, a media geography has been generated intersecting the media scape with the geographical reality of the city.

CityMurmur aims at addressing maps and diagrams, not as passive representation of realities, but as tools for interpretation and action. It wants to build a time-based narrative, an historical archive of media coverage of the urban space which is able to reveal some hidden dynamics useful for city policy support, critical media analysis, and sociocultural research.

CityMurmur is an on-going project that will be performed in several cities. The first one was Madrid, as a result of the Visualizar'08 workshop. The media space is composed by a RSS feed pool containing 733 sources. Starting from an official list of Spanish media, the authors classified all the sources and their RSS feeds through denotative categories (topic, type and impact), while also tagging some of them with connotative categories. Once the RSS feed is downloaded, and an in-depth scanning of the news is performed, each post is matched against the OpenStreetMap street database to check...