I came across this awesome online tool from ito! that lets you visualise the changes made to OpenStreetMap for a specific area. You do need to register and then you can select your area of interest and see the changes made over the last configurable period. For example the additions made to Brisbane over the last 12 months:
Click for full resolution.
I’d love to talk to these guys more when we have some high performance vector rendering inside DeepEarth.
Imagine this powerful visualisation much more interactive in Silverlight. How I found these guys was from there amazing render of the changes made to OSM over 2008:
OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo. Simple awesome, these guys know how to make sweet data visualisations.