Last night Geograph British Isles covered its 100,000th grid square. It’s just incredible that in just over a year we’ve got an image for 40% of the 1km grid squares in Great Britain. It’s also good to see that depth is being developed too – we’ve over 160,000 images in total, and it looks likely that number of images per grid square will only increase over time.

The growth has been remarkably steady – we’ve averaged around 500 new photos a day for some time now…

It’s pretty impressive going for a site that has had a zero budget, and the end result is a wonderful, growing resource of Creative Commons licenced pictures and information.

A huge thankyou to the thousands of crazy individuals who’ve got the “Geograph bug” and go out taking the pictures. I salute you!

The OpenStreetMap project is going to map the Isle of Wight this weekend, using hundreds of volunteers simply recording a tracklog with their GPS units.

This is fantastic, and it will be interesting to see how successful such an effort is. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Geograph, it’s that if you can attract even a small dedicated band of contributors, there’s no end to what can be achieved.

I hope the event is a success, it would be great to see local events springing up. On the geograph site we have the concept of “geograph points” awarded to the first person who contributes a suitable image for a grid square. This has worked tremendously well in encouraging coverage, as well as friendly rivalry between contributors. Something similar might work in OpenStreetMap’s favour, maybe tracking people by distance covered in their tracklogs, or points for completing a particular motorway or A road…