The London OpenStreetMap pub meet-up is such a recent event it didn't happen yet! but it will happen TONIGHT. Now let's work backwards through some other London geo-goings-on in reverse chronological order:

Agi geodrinks were good. AGI events tend to be a great opportunity for mingling with geo industry folks, many of whome are interested in learning more about OpenStreetMap and perhaps even doing some geo-business. Andy Allan and I were there trying to do this, but mostly we accidentally ended up talking about OpenStreetMap between ourselves as usual. Good fun though. We did get chatting to someone who had a inflatable globe, and also with Nick Austin about a possible OSM event run by/for Swindon Council. More details on that soon hopefully.

I also went along to a MySociety pubmeet last Wednesday. I had intended to swing by very briefly to see what was going on, but ended up staying around for lots of fun and interesting conversations. Some of this was around open transport data which mysociety has an interest in for FixMyTransport, and I have an interest in for my work at placr.co.uk, but I also got chatting with Tom Steinberg about various OpenStreetMap things, and about ways of appealing to non-techy mainstream audiences by offering the kind of stripped down simple UX which MySociety is good at. He suggested an app which allowed map users to "say thanks" to mappers in a particular area. Nice idea. In general I'd say there should be better social interaction features and better, less obscure, ways of discovering who's been active in an area. Yes all of the ways listed here are obscure. I also chatted about an old MySociety project called GroupsNearMe, which I used to like. It had a interesting mapping element, but they've mothballed that project.

But the daddy of all geo-goings-on was #geomob! We enjoyed three OpenStreetMap themed talks this time, and even the talk which wasn't OpenStreetMap themed (DoomsdayMap project), made mention of OpenStreetMap. Now that's what I call geodomination! Ed Freyfogle spoke about Nestoria switching to OpenStreetMap. He had an amusing web analytics graph showing the spike in interest that this blog post attracted back in December. Quite a story, and it triggered the whole switch2osm thing.

Off the back of this talk it was very appropriate for Matt to talk about his work at MapQuest, on architecting their tile servers to scale for massive tile traffic while still bringing in minutely updates from OpenStreetMap. Not an easy thing. The approach involves bundling up mapnik, webserver, tile queueing/caching system to run on one machine template which can then be duplicated to scale sideways, but then caching and queueing gets shared across the cluster so... all a bit complicated. If you have many servers to try this kind of thing out on (??), you'll be interested to know that Matt published their rendering stack as open source.

Benedikt Groß & Bertrand Clerc gave a talk about their weird and whacky project to warp the London map (OpenStreetMap of course) to align with people's perceptions, and more recently to align with the tube map schematic layout. Their blog post explains some more including some nice animations of the warp, but mostly I'd recommend zooming in on the slippy map view. Quite fascinating in the bits of London you know (or thought you knew). My favourite example is around Queensway where I used to live.

The road called Queensway confusingly has two tube stations on it, Queensway and Bayswater, spaced a long way apart on the tube map (on different tube lines) but in reality very close, hence we see intensely stretched streets between the two stations here. As you can see the street names such as Queensway itself are still clearly rendered. This is not rubber-sheeted raster images. The map data is OpenStreetMap warped while in vector form and then rendered with Maperative. Cool!

So lots of geo OSM niceness recently, and there's more to come! Last week I decided to give up twitter for lent. This includes tweeting from @OSMLondon. Derick is in charge of those for the moment. I'm not even allowing myself to view them, but I'm sure he'll be glad of any suggestions for things to tweet about. I'll be maintaining the list of events on the wiki, and look! There's a pub meet-up TONIGHT. Join us in the Blue posts from 7p.m.