Nestoria hearts GeoNames & Scale Camp
Geonames iss an online database of locations and their co-ordinates – something like 10 million places are listed – that we're all welcome to use under a Creative Commons license. If you haven't heard of it or used it check it out – it's got the basic text search front page, just like Nestoria does, and returns a list of places that could match your search, which you can then check out on a map.
As you can imagine it's a hugely valuable, and free, resource for any site developers wanting or needing map data. As we're expanding into new, and less reliably mapped territories we're coming to appreciate these sorts of global, open source repositories of geo data even more, which is why we're sponsoring GeoNames to help them keep providing the service.
They say they're receiving around 11 million web service requests each day, so that's quite a lot of service to be keeping up. In addition to hearting wiki style and user generated open source mapping sites and services, this week we're also hearting and sponsoring Scale Camp, which is an informal event (The Guardian who organise it call it an unconference) for people who're interested in scaling and performance.Some Nestorians attended last year and reported back that they: “learned a few web scalability tricks, shared a few of our own, met some interesting people, and drank some tasty beer.” So how could we not want to be part of it again.
