New from the MySociety genii:, the curiously-capitalised PlaceOpedia. Think Google Maps ∩ Wikipedia. Brilliant. Except that, as I write, all the links read '#needsJS' and hence it doesn't actually work. Doubtless it will, soon.
Also: YourHistoryHere, a very similar deal only for historical data. I can't immediately see why the two sites are separate, rather than having temporal metadata attached to the Placeopedia entries and then allowing filtering, but hey, what do I know? I'm frazzled after studio and not thinking straight.
Aha! Found a quote from Tom Steinberg thus:
This site is on limited circulation at the moment, and is only supposed to be a mySociety demo, not a big posh project like PledgeBank. It may not be obvious, but the most important feature of YourHistoryHere is the construction of an underlying system for collecting and sharing geographic annotations in an open syndicated format, so you can use the yummy local data people leave for your own purposes. We're building two sites that show how this can be useful, this one and Placeopedia.com, and we'd love to share the code for other ideas. Anyone want to build WhereIHadMyFirstKiss.com?
That makes more sense, then.
