GeoFabrik are German OpenStreetMap specialists, and they provide some very useful data and tools for those who work with, or are interested in OpenStreetMap (OSM).

I frequently download Shapefiles of OSM data from their servers, you can get your hands on them here: http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/

Recently I’ve been playing with one of their Lab products: OSM History and have generated an animated .gif of the progress of OSM in Ireland, from it’s beginning in April 2006 (when there were less than 7,000 nodes on the map) up to August 2010 (when the map had more than 1.8 million nodes) Here it is:

If the animation doesn’t work, you can see the original here

Impressive, eh?