Thanks to everyone who attended the Freebase user group meeting on Wednesday night. We had 30+ people in attendance and seven talks by Metaweb staff and members of the Freebase community.

We’ll have some video to post soon, I hope, but in the meanwhile here’s a photo of Jamie’s presentation, which I think many people will agree was the highlight of the evening. He showed us how he and Jonathan Lowe have been working on generating maps using data from Freebase.

The map in the picture above shows Berkeley, California with the university outlined in orange and coloured shading for different soil types. All the data to build the map is coming out of Freebase. The system’s still in development, but stay tuned for an announcement of general availability and a demo you can play with sometime in the nearish future.

Other speakers at the user group meeting included Stephanie Hornung, Robert Cook, Jason Douglas, Toby Segaran, Kirsten Jones, and Aaron Swartz on topics ranging from Flash applications to community building.

The next user group meeting will be in early April.