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New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

maps.stamen.com

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Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#4

Post by guan »

Northsider wrote: post #2

Great to see OSM projects advancing more and more each day. I love the style of the Toner profile...minimalist and simple. As someone in the digital mapping industry, I really wish we'd open our data up a bit more.

I also love the high contrast look of Toner. Way too many OSM styles, and non-Google maps in general, have too little contrast.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#7

Post by lucianof »

When I first looked at OpenStreetMap a couple years ago I dismissed it solely because I didn't like the tile design. But now I see more and more really beautiful designs popping up (e.g. also those from http://mapbox.com/) and I expect OSM to gain a lot of importance in the next years (overtaking Google Maps maybe?). These 3rd-party tile designs a beautiful example of how much more can be done with data that's truly open!

The one thing I don't understand is who pays for hosting it. Once everyone uses OSM, won't it be prohibitively expensive for a non-profit to serve it? Maybe I'm wrong and it's not that much of an issue. Does anyone have an idea how much it costs Google to serve the Google Maps API? Wikipedia is in the same situation, and they solve it with their donation pleas. Maybe it would make sense if a fraction of our ISP bill automatically goes to the most visited non-profit websites. They offer kind of a public good to everyone, after all.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#8

Post by untog »

lucianof wrote: post #7

When I first looked at OpenStreetMap a couple years ago I dismissed it solely because I didn't like the tile design. But now I see more and more really beautiful designs popping up (e.g. also those from http://mapbox.com/ ) and I expect OSM to gain a lot of importance in the next years (overtaking Google Maps maybe?). These 3rd-party tile designs a beautiful example of how much more can be done with data that's truly…

Once everyone uses OSM, won't it be prohibitively expensive for a non-profit to serve it?

Yes. The problem is that Google has started charging now as well- at least, once you hit a certain threshold. They might have a deal available for non-profits, I'm not sure. It's certainly something I'd hope MapBox are working on, because non-profit mapping seems like a large (and worthwhile area).

No doubt, the bandwidth costs are expensive, though. I made my own custom map tiles (you can see a demo of them in use at http://www.taxono.my) and put them behind an Amazon CloudFront server, which makes it about as cheap as possible. But still, if my traffic gets huge, it could be an issue.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#10

Post by wmf »

lucianof wrote: post #7

When I first looked at OpenStreetMap a couple years ago I dismissed it solely because I didn't like the tile design. But now I see more and more really beautiful designs popping up (e.g. also those from http://mapbox.com/ ) and I expect OSM to gain a lot of importance in the next years (overtaking Google Maps maybe?). These 3rd-party tile designs a beautiful example of how much more can be done with data that's truly…

Once everyone uses OSM, won't it be prohibitively expensive for a non-profit to serve it?

Wikipedia says no, but that may be an outlier. IMO they should start internalizing costs (especially for embedded maps) now before they get out of control, perhaps by throttling access so that high-volume users are encouraged to mirror and serve the data themselves. Coral CDN has a similar strategy: you can use it for free, but only a certain amount.

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