I love Google and all, but allow me to be snarky yet again at Google for introducing their Mapping Party Kit late last month. A Google Mapping Party is an event where you invite people to a venue, give them a presentation on Google Map Maker, and them let them try their hand at mapping their locality. The Mapping Party Kit is a simple reference website for anyone who wants to throw a Mapping Party. The site contains sample invitation letters, an agenda example, a presentation, and links to other resources such as Google blog posts about Map Maker.

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Wow! The Philippine Blogging Summit, popularly known as iBlog, is now on its fifth year. This is a wonderful milestone and I would like to congratulate Ms. Janette Toral and the UP College of Law through its Internet and Society Program. I have been attending since iBlog3 and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I consider the Philippine Blogging Summit is the mother of all blog events in the country and iBlog has become a national event with the attendance of Davao (Mindanao) bloggers in iBlog4 and the Cebu bloggers this year. So if you’re a Pinoy blogger and you’ve never been to one, then you should go next year to iBlog6!

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In OpenStreeMap, a Mapping Party is “where a group of OpenStreetMappers and novices descend on an area to map it exhaustively, usually over a weekend.” Well, the OSM Philippines community will be having its very first Mapping Party and the area we chose is the picturesque City of Tagaytay. Shown below is how Tagaytay currently looks like in OpenStreetMap (the data is overlaid on top of SRTM3 terrain data).

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My fellow Wikipedian TheCoffee has spotted in a locally-produced coffee table book what appears to be plagiarism of text from Wikipedia. The book, titled Central Philippines, seems to be a tourism-oriented book containing pictures taken in and around the Visayas with brief introductory prose of the constituent provinces. It is these introductions that manifest the plagiarism. TheCoffee gave an example of Negros Oriental from the book:

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