Flickr has begun integrating Open Street Map map data into their world map feature.

It turns out that the data that Yahoo! Maps uses for Beijing is not very rich, so it would seem that Flickr looked to Open Street Map to improve their offering. The funny thing is, according to Flickr’s blog post on the subject, the process actually happened the other way around. Regardless, the point is that since Open Street Map data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license, Flickr was able to integrate Open Street Map tiles to replace a section of the Yahoo! Maps data.

I recommend checking out Flickr’s blog post for more details and some good before and after shots where you can see the city transform from a grey mass into a network of streets and other features.

I have been contributing to Open Street Map for the past few months so it’s nice to see the work being put to use like this.

Seen on Webware

Update:

Flickr is also using OSM for:

Buenos Aires
Rio de Janeiro
Mexico City
Melbourne
Sydney
Tokyo
…and probably a bunch more places too.

It was Eva’s birthday on Saturday and she celebrated with a potluck. Her chosen theme was “Celebrity favorites”. Or, less confusingly, the favorite food of celebrities.

I decided to go with Barbara Streisand’s favorite, which is apparently, chocolate blackout cake. It’s worth noting that there are only two references on the entire internets that link Barbara Streisand to blackout cake. One being the page where we found the original, non-vegan recipe, and another page that mentions that Rosie O’Donnell once sent her a “genuine” Ebingers Blackout Cake. The word “genuine” is in quotes because there is some debate as to whether the Ebingers brand baked goods that resurfaced in the early ’90s were the real thing, or not. The original Ebingers went bust in the ’70s.

Anyway, enough about the validity of my choice. It clearly doesn’t matter since Eva decided to push the definition of the actual word celebrity. She made Garfield’s lasagne. Does that count? At least no one is contesting that lasagne isn’t Garfield’s favorite food.

The point is, that I made blackout cake from Vegan With A Vegeance and it turned out to be totally awesome. The cake was super moist and had really nice structure! The raspberry goes really well with the chocolate and the ganache frosting is super velvety but not too sweet (which is my common gripe with frosting). If you don’t have the book you can find the recipe online, but I suggest you buy it anyway because it’s awesome.