OpenStreetMap
About a week ago I managed to find and download the most recent orthoimagery the USGS took of Salem, OR. I've been spending the week setting up GeoServer and massaging the data, and have just recently got it to a working state.
The resolution is on par with what Google has (0.15m) and is even slightly newer (2008 instead of 2005)! Needless to say, it blows the Yahoo imagery of the area out of the water :D
Working with the data has so far been a dream, except for GeoServer's penchant for running out of memory. I'm going to be playing with it for another few days and hope to provide the WMS address to a few other mappers in the area once I'm satisfied with the stability.
Discussion
Comment from Baloo Uriza on 24 November 2009 at 20:29
Are you using Tilecache for that or something else? Also, I'm leaving Salem next month for Portland, and I'm honestly not sure I'd return save to see folks I know down here or to go sit in on a session at the capitol now and then. Kind of sucks everyone in this city's divorced with kids, working three jobs and doesn't have time for you...
Comment from JigPu on 25 November 2009 at 10:11
No caching other than regular HTTP caching. GeoServer comes with its own WMS tile cacher, but its incompatible with JOSM (it can't handle "arbitrary" bounding boxes).
Even if it were compatible though, I fear for the disk space it would use :D The dataset as downloaded from the USGS is about 30 GB in uncompressed GeoTIFFs. I've managed to squeeze this down to about 1.3 GB of JPEG2000 files, but a cache of the various zoom levels would easily balloon up a few more GB. I can only imagine how big Google's worldwide tile cache is o.O