LA Times “My Map” Map of Latest Fires

It’s here.

There’s lot of great detail and time stamps for all additions. I’m still looking a way for creators of such map to source the data points. Are they from LA Times reporters? Officials? People on scene? How can one contribute?

There will be more, not fewer of these sorts of maps from the media and other interested parties. We need tools to give the maps (and orgs behind them) appropriate “authority.” One solution I ran into when looking at the H1N1 maps was from Rhiza Labs app which sits on top of Google Maps.

via @ManoMarks

iPhone, API and More Come to Burning Man

Brady over at O’Reilly details the new tech coming to the weeklong party on the playa gearing up this week in Nevada. (I’ve never attended, but have friends who have. I did spend a week on the playa flying kites.)

There are two really interesting socialogical, rather than tech insights from the post. First off, there’s the concept that Blackrock City (that’s the name of the temporary city) is a great place to test out new ideas. There’s an iPhone app, a Foursquare implementation and efforts to use machine tagging in Flickr. It is a literal “blank slate” (this year with wireless, fingers crossed) with lots of geeks and artists.

Second, there’s this year’s theme of “evolution” and the response of some noting how tech may well intrude. The places where there’s no connectivity are becoming fewer and fewer.