If any of this blog’s readers will be attending OSCON July 25-29th in Portland, I suggest you check out the session being led by my codeveloper, Chris Smith, leader and founder of the Transit Appliance project, citizen activist and blogger extraordinaire. He’ll be talking about the open-source roots of the Transit Appliance project, and how the use of open data, hardware and software allows us to create arrival displays that are “disruptively low cost.

Google Fusion Tables is a fairly new service many may not have heard of: it lets you manage large tabular datasets in the cloud, using Google’s infrastructure. You can then visualize that data in a variety of ways, including a Google Map. The coolest feature in my mind is the ability to geocode addresses to a map on the fly. There are lots of datasets out there that, rather than providing a mappable latitude and longitude, provide an address column (or street, city, state, &c.