Brady Forrest, at O'Reilly's Radar, tips us to an interesting mash-up of Flickr, Open Street Map and the  Burning Man festival.  Why not use this idea for local festivals — fairs, classic car rallies, an introduction to a new shopping center?

Flickr's Burning Man Map Uses Open Street Map

Posted: 26 Aug 2008 07:38 PM CDT

Flickr is best known for its photo-sharing, but increasingly its most innovative work is coming from its geo-developers (Radar post). Yesterday they announced the addition of a street-level map of Black Rock City so that we can view geotagged Burning Man photos. Flickr got the mapping data via Open Street Map's collaboration with Burning Man.

Flickr uses Yahoo! Maps for most of their mapping (and fine maps they are). The underlying data for them is primarily provided by NAVTEQ.
NAVTEQ's process can take months to update their customers' mapping
data servers. For a city like Burning Man that only exists for a week
every year that process won't work. However, an open data project like
Open Street Map can map that type of city. To the right you can see
what Yahoo's map currently looks like.

This isn't the first time Flickr has used OSM's data. They also used it to supplement their maps in time for the Beijing Olympics. I wonder if Yahoo! Maps will consider using OSM data so that their sister site doesn't continue to outshine them (view Beijing on Yahoo Maps vs. Flickr's Map to see what I mean). OSM's data is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.

In other geo-Flickr news they have added
KML and GeoRSS to their API. This means that you can subscribe to
Flickr API calls in your feed reader or Google Earth. (Thanks for the
tip on this Niall)

If you want to get more insight into Flickr's geo-thinking watch their talk from the Where 2.0 2008
conference after the jump.