Around 6000 populated places in the Czech Republic have been updated with a free dataset collected by Czech GRASS users.
We have updated latitude and longitude, the population and the Kraj (region) of the places. In average we have moved the places by 0.8 km.
Thanks to Klokan Petr Pridal for his help.
With the newest load we have added French to the languages for which geonames supports wikipedia fulltext search and text blurbs. These features are now available in English, German, French, Spanish and Polish.
The total number of entries since July has increased from 230,000 to 500,000, an increase of 117%. The number of entries in English has increased from 53,000 to 81,000 (52%) and the number of entries in German from 38,000 to 51,000 (26%). Other languages are catching up. Dutch, French and Italian also have around 50,000 geolocated entries.
You find detailed numbers on the geonames wikipedia page :
The numbers of previous months are available here :
Searching for geographical names with your web browser has now become even easier. We have added an OpenSearch description to geonames that allows you to directly search the geonames database from your browsers search bar. OpenSearch is supported by Firefox 2.0 and InternetExplorer 7.
Installation of this small plugin is very simple. Just go to the geonames home page and open the drop down list of your search bar. You will see an option add “geonames”. Select this option and the geonames search engine will be added to your search bar. From now on you can just type into your browsers search bar to search for geographical names.
GeoNames Blog 