I hope they replace the Google earth plugin with WebGL at some point. Kind of annoying having to install a plugin for this.
Watch Google Map Edits Live
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: Watch Google Map Edits Live
#12Just ate a sandwich while watching this. It was stimulating. If you ever have some time to kill when you can't use your hands, this is a cool thing to watch.
Hah, just did the exact same thing with a chocolate cupcake.
Re: Watch Google Map Edits Live
#13It's a shame that people contribute data to Google Maps when something like Open Street Maps exists. If I'm going to spend the time it takes to map something, I'd much rather it go into an open source project rather than just improving the product of a for-profit company. http://www.openstreetmap.org/
I would say it is probably because Google makes it very easy to edit maps and it offers navigation. Open Street Map doesn't allow you to enter two addresses and find a route between them. (At least not as far as I can tell.) Therefore if you are living in an area where you want that ability and your local area is not yet mapped, you will map it in Google, not in Open Street Map. Additionally if you are a business own…
>> Open Street Map doesn't allow you to enter two addresses and find a route between them.
That isn't true. CloudMade offers a routing service based on OSM data, and a number of applications use that service to offer driving directions
Re: Watch Google Map Edits Live
#14It's a shame that people contribute data to Google Maps when something like Open Street Maps exists. If I'm going to spend the time it takes to map something, I'd much rather it go into an open source project rather than just improving the product of a for-profit company. http://www.openstreetmap.org/
Everything that people contribute through Map Maker is available freely for non-commercial purposes (with some restrictions). However, the license is certainly not as permissive as Open Street Map.
Re: Watch Google Map Edits Live
#15It's a shame that people contribute data to Google Maps when something like Open Street Maps exists. If I'm going to spend the time it takes to map something, I'd much rather it go into an open source project rather than just improving the product of a for-profit company. http://www.openstreetmap.org/
Everything that people contribute through Map Maker is available freely for non-commercial purposes (with some restrictions). However, the license is certainly not as permissive as Open Street Map. https://services.google.com/fb/forms/mapmakerdatadownload/
- US data is not available.
- The last update was 4 months ago.
- It is provided in KML format, which is quite difficult to work with in existing spatial tools beyond Google Earth.
Re: Watch Google Map Edits Live
#16I think it is incredible to see all the edits going on all around the world, and to see how Google is leveraging its huge reach to get its users to name roads and fill in businesses all over the world, even in remote areas.
And how sad it is that those edits are going to google maps instead of OSM.
Re: Watch Google Map Edits Live
#17I think it is incredible to see all the edits going on all around the world, and to see how Google is leveraging its huge reach to get its users to name roads and fill in businesses all over the world, even in remote areas.
And how sad it is that those edits are going to google maps instead of OSM.
That is over-dramatic in my opinion. Google Maps is a good tool: it works well, and is already more complete than OSM is. Therefore I would rather see one extremely complete map than two half complete maps. In my opinion there is nothing sad about a good map getting better.
Re: Watch Google Map Edits Live
#18It's a shame that people contribute data to Google Maps when something like Open Street Maps exists. If I'm going to spend the time it takes to map something, I'd much rather it go into an open source project rather than just improving the product of a for-profit company. http://www.openstreetmap.org/
To be precise, OSM is not public domain data. It is under CC-BY-SA and migrating to ODbL. (The migration will probably be painful.)
You can see how the migration is going at http://odbl.de/
Acceptance is very low in Australia.
Re: Watch Google Map Edits Live
#19What I learned whilst watching this for 5 minutes, was that a lot of escort agencies use Google Maps and Google Earth to advertise.
I don't know how maps are classified, and whether data about businesses are adverts or just facts about places. But in the UK adverts have to be "legal, decent, honest and truthful, to the benefit of consumers, business and society".
As such, it opened up a whole new world of spam-fighting to me. Google must be scrubbing this dataset as quickly as others add stuff.
Re: Watch Google Map Edits Live
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
OSM is the data. It is not the example map rendering on openstreetmap.org. Sad but true. I wish there was no map at all but instead a selection of nice looking and more useful maps listed. For routing give these a try: http://map.project-osrm.org/ http://open.mapquest.com/ http://maps.cloudmade.com/ http://openrouteservice.org/ Compared to proper editors the Google map maker thing is horrifying. I tried to use it onc…
http://openrouteservice.org/ The was the only one that opened upon a map over me :-)
That is bad (especially because I personally like that one the least). Could you share details about your configuration?