I'm so excited about this, it's actually a little bit embarrassing.

I've got two geo-related projects that are half-finished -- both because I was dealing with poor / non-existent geographic data. I haven't had a chance to plug this new data into my code, but I can already tell it's vastly superior to any other free sources out there (OpenStreetMap may have more data, but it's not as conveniently packaged).

Excellent find! One of the best discoveries all week :-)

Oh gosh, haven't tried the downloads yet, but good geodata is really hard to get without going through a bunch of hassle.

I know next to nothing about geographical data / cartography, but it would be nice to have these in SVG, like in this how to from Flowing Data:

http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-th...

I haven't looked, but it should be fairly easy to convert.

Unless the data is in one of the proprietary GIS formats, then you're in for a late night hellride. GDAL/OGR may be your friend, or may not.

It looks like a nice dataset, but only has center lines for rivers -- no polygon data.

I am literally in the process of changing out Stormpulse.com's maps for something higher res (BlueMarble at 500m), and this shows up. Awesome!