Okay

So this Google guy's started a blog and I figure I should do one too.

Basically Google are shitting themselves now because we've started this idea of collaborative mapping. We don't need to blog because we're a collaborative project which means we have no secrets, apart from some really exciting stuff I'm working on at the moment which I can't tell you about.

But - ok, this is the thing - Google don't get it, they think you can just keep all your contributors like hamsters in a cage and get all the cheap data without building the community, which is like totally - no! Already the smart guys are giving us their data and selling out. It's like Linux all over again, except we have cooler parties and more Germans. What is it with all these German guys?

But like I say, we pioneered this idea of crowdsourcing. So on the way back from the office tonight I'm going to crowdsource a bus (hitch a ride) and it just totally subverts all the big guys and you have to keep up. The bus guys have been spending all this money on hardware (bendy buses) and we're like that's so over. Apparently there are some guys at Waterloo Bridge who have crowdsourced their income by asking lots of people for a little bit of money each, maybe I'll stop by and check these guys out. Agile not fragile - that's my new motto.

Incidentally some of you guys have asked me why our new company this week is called Cloud Made. Well we got some Japanese VC funding and they kept calling it that. It's a free market so if they're prepared to pay for it we'll call it what they want. We've told them it'll cost more to rename our other project to OpenStleetMap though.