I’ve just read in HowToForge a nice article about Piwik, an open source web analytics tool.

You can download Piwik and install it on your own server to gather analytics data that could replace your usage of Google Analytics. In my personal opinion, it is always nice to have two services running to make sure you’re getting the right analytics data or still have data in case something happens and one service breaks.

What seems pretty neat about Piwik is the fact that it works with plug-ins so you can add and remove functionalities that are suitable for you. The service runs on php and MySQL so it should be an easy install process, the site says less than 5 minutes.

They’re on version 0.2 right now but give it a try, their online demo sems pretty awesome.

Google Maps could very well be the most highly used online map service, why would anything else be better? GMaps’ data is proprietary, you can use it but with some restrictions and software developers can not use its full potential for their own benefit.

OpenStreetMap is a world map done entirely from user’s submitted data. Similar to a wiki, you construct the map details by adding street names, information of buildings, commercial and government establishments, everything including terrain information.

The amount of data OpenStreetMap has about some areas in Europe I checked sometimes is even better than Google Maps. There are thousands of active participants throughout the world collaborating in this project. You can participate in various ways, from uploading data recorded by your GPS unit and even editing directly on the web in OSM’s own website.

With OSM we can have a project such as Open Route Service that provides a very nice set of directions to and from your next destination. If there is any information in these services that is incorrect, we can easily fix it.

The only thing I think would make it better is adding more user generated photos so we can have something similar to Google’s Street View.

Bookmarking social web service Ma.gnolia has announced that they’re building a v2.0 of their platform, aka M 2, that will be completely open sourced. We already love Ma.gnolia from the fact that it uses OpenID, eliminating the need to create yet another username and password to use the service.

M 2 will be a rewrite of the entire Ma.gnolia platform so all of the current features should be kept for the open source community. Users will be able to create their own branded social bookmarking service. The sites bookmarked on the self-hosted version will also be indexed by the main Ma.gnolia site.

We’ve announced that Reddit also made the open source move back in June. Reddit’s intent is to increase features by having the assistance of open source enthusiast coders. Ma.gnolia can also benefit from added functionality but even better for them, increase its popularity and amount of content indexed.

Ma.gnolia promised to release the first codes in September. Meannwhile, another good open source bookmarking platform is GetBoo.