Recently, on 10. January, an illegal horse racing, in a sort of clandestine racetrack was blocked by the military police in Pachino, Syracuse (Sicily, Italy). The blitz has, so far, allowed to identify more than 20 horse owners, jockeys and 3 veterinarians. The land placed in the open countryside, less than 2km from the sea, where the race was stopped, was a clandestine race-course, complete with boxes for the horses.

Just after discovering the news, I went hunting for that track on aerial images. We have been lucky enough to have been granted access to some 25cm resolution images, these images were made by the Regione Sicilia, after some more research I ended up discovering that the racetrack is located in Contrada Granelli, and not nearby the inhabited part of the Pachino town, so in the end, I was able to find it on the map, and tag it accordingly.

<way id=”49641876″>
<tag k=”clandestine” v=”yes”/>
<tag k=”leisure” v=”track”/>
<tag k=”name” v=”Granelli”/>
<tag k=”sport” v=”horse_racing”/>
</way>

Here is the result:

horse

Show embedded map in full-screen mode

Surely this is not as important as what my friend Mikel is doing in Kibera, but still a declaration of indipendence from the canonical mapmakers.

                          

I’m not particularly involved in Tweeter, I’m seldom following some friends, but never twitted once.

This über-mashup is really reality-augmenting: Stweet, a drop-down menu allows you to choose between some twitter-ready cities around the world. Rome is one of them.

                          

The City of Ann Arbor has created a nice Google Maps Mashup which enables you to select a given street and send a service request to the Town Hall.

You basically select a request type from a drop-down menu, fill out some fields and hit the send button.

A great service from a municipality.