I so want to try out MapBox’s offerings. They provide geospatial datasets as Amazon EBS volumes that you can mount on EC2, an awesome way to source free data for access in your applications. They currently have snapshots of the OpenStreetMap Planet database, US Census TIGER/line data, and NASA’s CGIAR Worldwide DEM.
Even though mapping toolkits like Mapnik, Tilecache, and OpenLayers are getting extremely good, tools like what MapBox provides make it easier to jump into providing your own custom maps and data for mapping apps, instead of relying on Google or Yahoo to handle everything for you. Nothing’s wrong with using those commercial APIs for basemaps, but for certain applications, it makes lots of sense to have more control over your cartographic style.
Andy Baio from Waxy.org uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to analyze data about the sample’s used in Girl Talk’s album Feed the Animals.
You can download GT’s album here, and choose whether to pay or not to pay.
