Tuesday, 1 July 2008

What Map Maker is /is not [DRAFT]

Bit of a down moment in the last post, time to pick it up !! I'm hurt by this but they will not drag me down !!

Last week I introduced Map Maker a set of online map making tools to very positive… but not universal acclaim.

I can't understand where SteveC is coming from - it's just fucking amazing and we're going to shit all over everybody, but I think it’s important to clarify a few points.

Map Maker is clearly not an freetard project, and as such is not in competition with the freetards and does not I believe represent a forking opportunity for the creation of open geodata. If you wish to help build an open geodata based global map then go live in your hut or buy a prius, hippie.

What Map Maker represents is the revolution coming home. While I invented maps, location and croud sourcing of map data, the key for me was the love of the people. We are now telling the users of Uncle Ed's Maps to do our work for us by providing mapping data using this cobbled together tool. The data submitted is licensed by contributors to Google and NavTeq can go fuck themselves.

This is a key difference in approach to the freetards, most end users of Google Maps/Earth etc. and most developers using their api’s don’t want or need rants about licenses, access to every little number is a database or whatever it is they do. They of course want Uncle Ed's Maps.

Although never a freetard project, it does produce data that is 'free' to users, the information contributed by the community becomes freely available to them via Uncle Ed's Maps and the Maps and Earth API’s. And we pay for the servers with some ads.

This is the thin end of the wedge. I really wanted to launch it worldwide but I was still in paleoland when the Red Level Googlers signed agreements with our data suppliers so we can't screw them yet - but I'm going to see their 'oh' face before long. 'oh!' 'oh!' 'oh!'. You know what I'm talking about.

Written and submitted from the Virgin Galactic lounge using it's mind network.

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