One of the great things about mapping for OpenStreetMap is the things you find while out and about, heading down every street, path and passageway that will allow you through.

It was while surveying in an area I've been meaning to do for some time, but never quite found the motivation, just over the Hagley Road and down towards Harborne that I came across the Moor Pool estate.

The first indication that this was not just a typical set of streets was one called 'The Circle,' inside which is the Moorpool Hall and two tennis courts. Cycling around, it became obvious this was some community in itself, just a short distance from Harborne High Street and the A4040.

According to the website of the Moorpool Residents Association:

"The estate was established in 1907 by John Nettlefold, first chairman of Birmingham Housing Committee and member of the Guest Keen Nettlefold (GKN) family. It formed part of the Garden City concept shared by the Cadbury family in Bournville, to provide low density housing centred on a community hall and with many interspersed green spaces, at a time when the majority of inner city housing was of a crowded back-to-back design.

"The five hundred houses were built between 1908 and 1911 and shared a similar design, which can still be seen. The estate today boasts two tennis clubs, a bowling green, numerous allotments and, of course, the Moorpool itself with an active fishing club. In the Moorpool Hall there is a very active and acclaimed dramatic society, a unique skittle alley dating back to 1913 and snooker tables. Many other groups and societies also meet there."

The houses were built 9 to an acre, when typical building was 40 per acre.

Unfortunately my mapping of the area was interrupted by my sister, who has lost her key and wanted me to return home and let her in. Getting home took approximately 1 hour (I saw a path through a small area of woodland I'd missed). Sorry, sis!

I'm working on editing Beaverton and surrounding area. So far it is all cleanups of existing Tiger data, comparing it to aerial photos and existing GPS tracks.

What connects them? Me. I have recently been up in Marlborough visiting family, and added more to my exclusive and growing map of the area. This time added some of Marlborough college grounds and also some tracks in Savernake Forest - a big job there - need to do it on a bike really.

A trip from Marlborough to Hereford allowed me to begin to fill in the gap between the M50 and the Hereford outskirts.

Closer to home I've spent some days cycling into the beautiful, but very hilly, Mid Devon area north and west of the Crediton to Bickleigh road, visiting Cheriton Fitzpaine, Stockleigh English and Shobrooke.

I found a tractor graveyard near Cadbury - just down the road to Cadeleigh, near Windwhistle Cross (great name - the wind was whistling when I was there!)

I can't make up my mind what the best way to map is. I started out working on my bike in blank areas I didn't know that well. I'd try to find roads that chopped the area in reasonable size chunks, then cycle a chunk at a time, load into josm, and check against yahoo that I hadn't completely missed anything.

Lately I've been trying to map the roads using the yahoo data first. I'm finding that that:

* massively reduces the time needed to get an initial idea of the road layout

* makes the process of following the roads massively more boring, and leads to me just noting road names and not riding down them if I can't see anything interesting. Which probably means I miss interesting hidden footpaths, etc.

Taking longer than needed seems silly, getting bored doing it even sillier (where other people have already done the roads from yahoo in an area I was going to map, I don't feel like cycling it at all - it's like the interesting bit's been done).

There must be some better way of combining the two than either of the above. What is it?

Added a few missing streets in anthoupoli area. Will add more as I track them

Added the streets of a small estate which is part of Elimbah township in Queensland, Australia.

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Finished off an area bounded by Bishopsgate, Middlesex Street St, Botolph Street and Houndsditch. Found a few more alleys and courts and added names to others. It's a great way to really see all of a local area.

Also added a few streets close to home in Northfields that I'd tracklogged last night. There's a lot of streets near me that have been marked but are unnamed so it is on my to-do-list to go around with a printout and fill them in.

There's a few of us picking away round the edges of Heathrow, but it looks like more using Yahoo imagery (which is a bit old for the area) than actually getting physically round the the area. Leaving quite a bit of it still blank. Which is a shame for several reasons: the Heathrow area tends to get used to illustrate articles, and that doesn't make osm look good; the Heathrow area is massively in the news over the new runway, and Sipson ought to be fully mapped before they start trying to bulldoze it - and it would be good for us if we had the best maps of the area showing people actually live there; and terminal 5 is launching soon and we don't have it yet...

But what to do about it? The geography means there isn't a single focal point for a mapping party. And some of the area isn't the most pleasant anyway - lots of fast roads and long-term planning blighted areas. Oh well, keep plodding on I guess. I may abandon my core Hounslow stuff and start doing the southern edge of Harlington and Hayes for a while.

I'm back from a road trip to Calgary and an afternoon of skiing at Lake Louise. The Garmin 305 captured a nice trace of the Saskatoon to Calgary trip that I plan to post on Routiki - http://www.routiki.com

Also managed to get some i18n work done on Routiki and added the Italian and Chinese languages.

Ich habe gerade 227 Änderungen von Ortsnamen innerhalb der Bounding Box von Thüringen hochgeladen: Präfix "Thüringen" entfernt; "x bei y" zu "x" gemacht; "Kurort" entfernt. Die Präfixe "Vogtland" habe ich mal in Ruhe gelassen, da war ich mir nicht sicher, ob das nicht doch manchmal so offiziell heisst. Das Tag "openGeoDB:auto_update" habe ich natürlich jeweils auch angepasst.

Put in a fair amount of data, and Viola! Tiger was conflated on top of it, I guess thats what you get when your in a hurry : ( I thought I'd go back in and clean it up. Relearning the J.O.S.M. thingamabob. Played on the user profile the map doohickey seems to need some help, the map on this blog is also on the fritz. I wonder what Tiger 2010 will bring.

Put in a fair amount of data, and Viola! Tiger was conflated on top of it, I guess thats what you get when your in a hurry : ( I thought I'd go back in and clean it up. Relearning the J.O.S.M. thingamabob. Played on the user profile the map doohickey seems to need some help. I wonder what Tiger 2010 will bring.

Put in a fair amount of data, the Viola! Tiger was conflated on top of it, I guess thats what you get when your in a hurry : ( I thought I'd go back in and clean it up. Relearning the J.O.S.M. thingamabob. Played on the user profile the map doohickey seems to need some help. I wonder what Tiger 2010 will bring.

Spent half an hour (or so) walking around the Artillery Lane and Petticoat Lane (Wentworth Street) area, filling in some of the little alleys and naming some roads. There has been and continues to be a lot of building work in the area so the arial images don't show exactly what's on the ground, but are good enough to get an idea of where the ways should go. It's a real warren!

Such is my lack of motivation to get out of bed when I don't really need to...

I'm busy on Friday so going to Shrewsbury on Saturday instead.

For now I'll map the area around Harborne I intended to do yesterday but ended up going to Selly Oak instead (sister wanted to try cycling her journey to work, with the result that I bought a new bike pump and cycle lock while passing Halfords). Apparently it took forty minutes to cycle 3 miles...

So if anyone wants to join me in Shrewsbury on Saturday, you've got a little more notice. Leave a comment/message and I'll try and set out a timetable.

Have been working on website for Valle San Giovanni (http://vallesangiovanni.com)

Yesterday we added much of the Wold Road area of Hull to the map. This was badly hit in last year's floods and it is still a mess. See my blog for more.

Got back from skiing in Isola 2000, France on Saturday. While I was there I managed to get GPS tracks of most of the Green, Blue and Red runs and took waypoints at the bottom and top of all the lifts. From what I saw of the black runs I didn't fancy them (very mogully) so someone else will have to do them another day. Slightly annoyed to realise I missed out just one lift (PARCS) on the last day so that'll remain off the map. Entered all the lifts with JOSM at the weekend and traced the piste tracks earlier this week, so now waiting for it to show up on the slippy map.

It was fun trying to "complete" the resort, gave another purpose to the week.

First set of edits.

Whilst correcting a cul-de-sac near me I managed to delete a whole street (sorry Welshie), which I've replaced now.

Added in Edgware bus station and a few service roads near there.

Marked Hendon Cemetery as such rather than golf course... Marked Golders Green crematorium.