The Secret Diary of SteveC

Why Google owns SketchUp (or, The Russians Are Coming)

2011-11-03T03:01:00.000-07:00

So I have my occasional differences with 'Cagey' James Fee but it's no big deal. He's a nice guy and his blog is kinda like the Village Voice for paleotards. Also it reminds me of those heady days five years ago when we called everything "spatial" because we thought it sounded cooler than "geo".

The other day he posted "It Still Blows My Mind That Google Owns Sketchup". Basically Cagey subscribes to what I call the tequila theory. This says that Ol’ Ed Parsons went out one night in Kingston, got completely slammed on tequila, came home, logged onto eBay and in a drunken stupor clicked 'Buy it Now' for some overhyped geo startup at well above market value. Admit it, we've all done it. (Juha Christensen is regretting it to this day. Heh heh.)

But although Cagey is a wise old sage, kinda like the Donald Knuth of geo (sorry "spatial"), he is way off the mark on this one. I mean:

Sounds pretty awesome, I know many people who as a hobby recreate the world around them in Google SketchUp. It also makes a huge 3D library available to the world for free.

Hey, what? People actually still believe this altruistic shit about Google?

So at OpenStreetMap we figured lesson one is get people to give you the data for free. Lesson two is you have to own the data. Ok, it took us five years to work that second one out which is why we're changing the license.

G learned both of these pretty quick. So when people "recreate the world around them in Google SketchUp", well, whaddyaknow, that's more free data for Google.

The result? In two years' time Google will have the only 3D map of the world and it will cost them precisely $0 in licensing fees. Ok, much of it will have been done in rudimentary form by analyzing StreetView footage and the sensing from the super secret Google imaging satellites which can detect rooftops to a resolution of 50cm and know what your cat does all day. That bit will look blocky and shit, yes. But G already knows 'good enough' works for maps, because they unleashed their barely-better-than-TIGER geodata on the States and basically No One At All Cares except for Cagey and Mike Dobson and the poor guys who drove into a river and died because Google claimed there was still a bridge there.

But - the gosh-wow brigade will be swooning over the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Houses of Parliament in centimeter-perfect detail, all drawn on SketchUp by some kid with Aspergers who unwittingly has licensed it all to G. (Ok, so OSM leads Google here because our kids with Aspergers are German kids with Aspergers but still.)

You think I'm kidding? Think phones. Nav apps sell phones and they will all be immersive 3D in two years' time, like Google Goggles on LSD (Steve Jobs would have been proud). Apple knows that, that's why they bought C3. We at Microsoft know that, that's why we're doing ReadWriteWorld. Obviously both of us are handicapped by not being evil but Google has no such disadvantage.

So you might ask what OpenStreetMap is doing in this new Space Race.

I can't say too much but if phase one was Germans... phase two involves Russians. Russian OSMers all think they're cats, map in five dimensions and write renderers so advanced that the major browsers are having to implement bug fixes to keep up. I shit you not. Be very, very frightened.

Newsflash from the Voice of Australia

2011-07-10T19:16:00.000-07:00

"NO!"

Google Whatever

2011-06-21T02:12:00.000-07:00

Slight correction to previous post.

Before	After
Quantum GIS	Google Earth
Quantum GIS source code	available¹ on signing partner agreement
PostGIS	Google Earth Pro
gvSIG Mobile	Google Earth for Android
gvSIG Mobile source code	available¹ on signing partner agreement
WFS + WMS	900913 tiles
OpenStreetMap	Google Map Maker
Geoserver	Google My Maps
OpenLayers	Google Maps API

¹ not available

FailWhatever

2011-06-16T07:49:00.000-07:00

I have been told that a certain company is renaming its products as FailWhatever. Or ArcWhatever. Or something.

This made me realise that the open source community could use some boost in product placement. Being the marketing genius I am (Who do you think invented the whatever for maps?), I propose the following changes:

Before	After
Quantum GIS	OSGeo for Desktop
Quantum GIS source code	OSGeo for Desktop Advanced
PostGIS	OSGeo for Server
gvSIG Mobile	OSGeo for Windows Mobile
gvSIG Mobile source code	OSGeo SDK for Windows Mobile
WFS + WMS	Data and Maps for OSGeo
OpenStreetMap	StreetMap Premium for OSGeo
Geoserver	Data Appliance for OSGeo
OpenLayers	OSGeo for the Interwebs

See? Now it's much more simple to identify each piece of software.

Know Your OSM Memes #4

2011-04-30T15:01:00.000-07:00

It's Advice Steve!

(thanks whatosm)

Announcing Microsoft's new OSM-powered traffic information system

2011-04-28T07:55:00.001-07:00

(Thanks dailywtf)

Dr Elizabeth Dodd

2011-04-19T05:53:00.000-07:00

Can somebody tell me what meadowdust means? I guess it must be some sort of weird Griffith dialect.

The Honeytrap Worked

2011-04-17T22:59:00.000-07:00

You can lock them out now.

OpenStreetMap to restrict future availability of planet.osm

2011-04-01T00:41:00.000-07:00

(reprinted from BusinessWeek, with thanks)

In the great geodata wars, OpenStreetMap (OSM) has portrayed itself as the open-source crusader doing battle against the leaders in proprietary data - Tele Atlas, Navteq and Google.

Unlike its rivals, OSM makes the underlying data for its popular map publicly available, and anyone can access it and tailor it for use in mobile phones, tablets, Garmin GPS units, even automobiles.

So what happens when OSM decides to keep the latest version of its map data to itself? Its fans are about to find out.

OSM says it will delay the distribution of its newest map data, known as planet.osm, at least for the foreseeable future. The project says the data, which is designed specifically for a rendering known as the 'Mapnik' style, is not yet ready to be altered by outside programmers and customized for other uses.

"To make an attractive map, we made some design tradeoffs," says Fake Mikel Maron, convener of OSM's Fake Strategic Working Group. "We didn't want to think about what it would take for the same data to be useful elsewhere. People would have had to stop tagging for the renderer, the Americans would have actually had to spend 15 minutes thinking about dupe nodes, and we'd have had a huge additional support burden. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut."

Maron says that if OSM were to open-source the data now, as it has with other versions of planet.osm, it couldn't prevent developers from putting the data in routing applications "and creating a really bad user experience. We have no idea if people can even route with this shit."

He points to a project called "Osmarender" as an example of the pitfalls of unfettered access to the data. "OSMF is still having to deal with claims for retina damage even today."

Instead, users will be encouraged to use a new, tightly-controlled routing option on the OSM front page. Access will also be available to map tiles through high quality "scraping" applications, such as GMapCatcher and Tilewolf, that have received a seal of approval from the OSM sysadmin team.

"OSM is an open-source project," Maron adds. "We have not changed our strategy."

Even so, the new approach represents a significant volte face for a project whose founder once defined "openness" as "wget http://planet.openstreetmap.org/planet-latest.osm.bz2". To ascertain the impact of this latest move, our reporters asked well-known "services on OSM" company, CloudMade, how the withdrawal of planet.osm would affect their future business plans.

But CEO Yahoo Smorgasbord told us that, as they were still crunching through a planet file from January 2009 with the aim of eventually refreshing their map tiles, maybe, they did not anticipate any serious problems.

Nevertheless, the open-ended delay will likely generate unease among device makers, application developers, and members of the open-source community, many of whom are financially and philosophically invested in OpenStreetMap. Some critics, principally based in Australia, have long questioned the OSM Foundation's commitment to openness, and this latest news will give them added ammunition. (That said, the same guys have also questioned the theory of evolution, the world being round, and gravity.)

It may also provide justification for critics of OSM, particularly from the traditional GIS world, who argued that it creates a Wild West of map data by allowing people to do what they pleased. Some of the early OSM routing applications, for example, looked silly when compared with professional products such as Google, mostly because OSM hadn't been built for this type of use, but also because they were trying to use Gosmore.

Still, programmers took the data and dished out subpar routing apps. This time around, the OSM Foundation appears to be reining in openness in favor of a highly controlled release of map data.

Sent from my Android phone

Things are going to change around here

2011-03-31T08:53:00.000-07:00

OSMF logo contest winner

2011-03-31T08:44:00.001-07:00

Private jet trauma

2011-01-27T16:35:00.001-08:00

So the good news about working at Bing is that I can afford a private jet, the bad news is that we haven't released OSM-based routing yet.

So to navigate the jet I have to use some app powered by my previous company. I don't need to tell you the rest.

Know Your OSM Memes #3

2011-01-09T15:13:00.000-08:00

Know Your OSM Memes #2

2011-01-06T09:22:00.001-08:00

Know Your OSM Memes #1

2011-01-06T08:36:00.000-08:00

Help me decide the place for the next meeting

2010-12-11T16:24:00.000-08:00

I already blogged about how awful a weekend this is. However, OpenStreetMap has always been a crowdsourced effort so YOU, my fellow ~~minions~~ contributors, and only YOU, are the ones who should have a say in how the OSM foundation meets. In the end, we're here to ~~spend the sponsor's money~~ serve the community.

In an effort to crowdsource our meetings (and avoid awful places like this hellhole) I've decided that YOU should set the place for our next meeting. And don't say we don't give you a voice on how to run things because I'm a benevolent dictator after all. I have pre-selected a few places from which you can choose:

If you can't see a way to vote, don't worry. I will shortly select a Collaborative Social Voting Web 3.5 application for your iPads. I mean, I know a thing or two about this, so the one I choose will be blessed with my wisdom and become the next big thing in voting. Maybe also the next big thing in feeding starving children. I mean, I have to do something about so many italians not eating proper caviar.

This flooding is awful

2010-12-10T12:20:00.000-08:00

I hope Mikel is bringing some of his Rescue Rangers with him. And a Garmin-to-gondola adapter. How does anybody map under these conditions?

Couldn't Simone have picked a board meeting location that wasn't suffering a flood emergency? I swear to God I thought he said "Pizza" and was talking about the catering. Oh, for the good old days when nobody on my Ministry of Truth had an accent.

I’m working at Microsoft and we’re donating imagery to OpenStreetMap!

2010-11-23T10:17:00.000-08:00

There's Nothing to See Here, Please Move Along Now

2010-10-08T12:40:00.001-07:00

OSM not always better

2010-09-27T05:55:00.000-07:00

So I’m getting some stick over the fact my modestly titled wedding invitation directed people to the venue with Google Maps... not OSM.

Let me spell it out for you.

Already I have to cope with you freaky stalker guys circulating photos of my stag night.

Now let’s say I use an OSM link for my wedding invite. First up, someone would claim that share-alike means you’re all invited to the wedding. Then they’d have a vote on the wiki and decide to rebrand the happy day as a nuptial mapping party (2pm: wedding service. 2.30pm: mapping party. 9pm: drinks with mandatory tagging discussion.) All the guests would be two hours late because some joker would have edited the connecting roads to lead to Denver’s red light district. Finally, someone would sneak in to the reception just to check whether the best man’s speech gives compliant attribution to OSM, and would heckle if it didn’t. Loudly. In German.

You think I’m kidding? Seriously, trouble-makers like you guys are why I need a branding iron in the shape of my initials.

2010-07-27T08:46:00.002-07:00

That humanitarian stuff Mikel is always on about is nice.

I'll have my people send him the used Garmins from the Community Team once we get back to port. "More foie gras, garçon"

How does advertising look now, hippies?

If you have a problem

2010-06-30T02:03:00.001-07:00

...if no-one else can help

...and if you can find them

maybe you can hire...

the OpenStreetMap Foundation's Assassination Working Group.

Featuring Howling Matt Amos

(Hannibal's real name is John Smith. Just saying)

Skobbler launches in the US using OSM data and CloudMade routing

2010-05-20T08:09:00.001-07:00

Mappers are expendable

2010-01-05T07:59:00.000-08:00

So as anyone who follows my Dopplr will know, I have a punishing travel schedule and typically circumnavigate the world three times in any given week. There’s just one reason for that - I’m spreading the word about OSM.

Actually there used to be two reasons. I used to put a GPS in the window (Business Class, natch. Thanks VC guys) and then ‘encourage’ the pilots to trace ground features. Unfortunately that had to stop after the episode where I asked them to do a couple of flypasts of the outline of the Pentagon and in fact I haven't been allowed back on American Airlines since.

Now many of you, my disciples, will have heard me talk about OSM. Wherever I am, you'll know there is one word I mention a lot in my talks. Community. Community. The C in SteveC doesn’t stand for Community but it should. Community, Community, Community. I’m a bit like Steve Ballmer in the Developers speech but without the sweaty armpits.

Listen to that word carefully. Community.

Not ‘mappers’.

TeleAtlas have mappers with their Map Insight thing, but they don’t have a community. Google have mappers, but they don’t have a community. Wikimapia have mappers, but not a community or even a licence, though they do have awsome moustaches and a song. And People’s Map don’t have mappers or a community but they do of course have beards.

So we’re the only ones with a community and that’s why we succeed.

So that means the community is more important than any single mapper. If you, as a single mapper, are endangering the community, we can’t afford to keep you. We have over 200,000 mappers now, we won’t miss one or two. I know this sounds a bit like socialism but I like to think of it as the market overcoming obstacles, or 'community libertarianism'. More on that in my forthcoming book 'Thoughts of Chairman Steve'.

Community is everything. For example Potlatch doesn’t have a development community which is why I keep bellyaching about it. Currently it has only one developer and 50,000 users. It would be much better if it were more like Mapzen which has 50,000 developers and one user.

So in August this guy Anthony arrived and has since proceeded to crap all over our mailing lists at extremely high volume. The talk list now comprises Anthony and five mad Aussies and everyone else has fucked off in desperation.

Anthony has a bit of a track record of fucking up communities and, in particular, of following his own pig-headed opinions on copyright no matter what anyone else thinks. Now he’s determined to do the same on OSM.

Mappers are expendable. Community is everything. 20 pages of tiny edits do not give you the right to ignore the community. The hive mind of OSM has not disappointed me yet. Go to it, disciples.

Shitholes

2010-01-02T05:07:00.000-08:00

So that smart Muti guy has figured that OSM has crap mapping for crap towns. We are 90% complete for London and 275% complete for Karlsruhe but when it comes to some town up north beginning with N, our mappers don’t even go there, sister.

Although we have at least put the railway station on the railway line rather than, for example, 750m offshore. Well done on that one, Ed. Also we don’t have a completely bogus motorway to the south.

Personally I don’t see why we need to map places where noone wants to go - it sounds like Schrodinger’s PND to me.

But maybe I can explain why “the gap between affluent and deprived LSOAs is growing”, which Nick translates for me as “the percentage of shitholes in OSM is going down”.

Back in the day we had mapping parties and all the old-school crowd turned up. We spent the day cycling around shitholes and dropping Gekos (remember them?) onto concrete. Then we came back to some room for which we had lost the key, spent two hours trying to upload the first node to the API, then went to the pub.

These days all the old-school crowd have got girlfriends, or spend all their time writing Fake blogs, or have been made redundant so can’t afford to travel to mapping parties any more. So we don’t have parties any more (look if you don’t believe me).

But, we figure, we have 10,000 new mappers per day (PR guy please check stats, thanks) so we don’t need parties.

Actually all the new mappers are still middle-class geeks who want to map their neighbourhood. It's rare that you find a rags-to-riches hero like me who has made their way up from the mean streets of Surrey. So the shitholes no longer get mapped.

Let’s make 2010 the Year of the Shithole Mapping Party and git those crap towns mapped. Or maybe we could wait until April and just lift the Ordnance Survey’s data. Tough call.

A fable

2009-12-06T13:40:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, a pioneering tribe of settlers established their village at the bottom of a mountain, an idyllic place where flowers grew and rainbows shone and communists were shot on sight.

Such was the fabled beauty and harmony of this village that it began to attract settlers from other villages. Hundreds flocked to it from such far-off settlements such as Karlsrühe, Kyiv, and some place or other up north whose name begins with N.

There was only one problem with this oasis of content. The footpath down to the river, where the villagers caught their fish, was rough, muddy, and liable to become a landslide at any moment.

Time passed, and the villagers grew prosperous. They had broadband, and iPhones, and copies of the Collected Thoughts Of Chairman Stallman.

Yet still the footpath was rough and muddy. It was even rumoured that the footpath had actually been built one drunken night to a set of instructions for a BMX track, and should never have been used for carting fish back to the village.

Some of the villagers, principally those who had come from Saxony, decided the best course of action was to spend endless hours in the village hall debating whether the muddy path should be called a “footpath” or a “path for feet” or a “designated permissive fish (freshwater) pathway for bipedalous ambulation in a progressive fashion”.

But a few of the wiser settlers decided to do something about it. They spent many hours in seclusion, looking at the ancient textbooks of footpath construction. Sometimes they invited footpath construction experts from other villages, who would tell them about what had worked in their village and what had not.

Every few weeks, one of these wise settlers would emerge, blinking, into the sunlight to tell the other villagers about their latest research. They pinned up updates on the village noticeboard. They even had a footpath debate at the annual village pow-wow (the ‘Althing’, they called it), in which they talked about what they had found, and asked the other villagers - who were, after all, villagers just like them - what they thought.

Some of the other villagers were sceptical. They had grown used to the muddy footpath. If falling over into the shit at regular intervals was the price they paid for living in an idyllic village, well, that was the way it was.

But the wise villagers invited them to join with them, and soon some of the sceptics were avidly studying footpath construction books too - even those from Saxony.

After many years of study, the day came when they had a plan for the new footpath. The new design wasn’t perfect, of course. Some of the handrails were a little ungainly and had rough edges. But it would be a tough, well-built path. All the way down to the river, the designers had included three types of supports - so that if two of them collapsed, still no-one would end up in the shit.

The wise villagers, burdened by the weight of carrying so many learned tomes on footpath construction, went hopefully to the other villagers and meekly sought approval for the new path.

To their amazement, a bunch of rowdy villagers stood up and exclaimed loudly, and repeatedly, that they didn’t want a new footpath and they didn’t see what was wrong with the old one.

One villager, Ulful, said no-one had ever asked him about the footpath. The oldest of the wise villagers - who, truth be told, had a volatile temper - pointed out acidly that Ulful had fallen into the shit twelve times in the last month alone, and that every time, someone had scurried to his aid and asked him about how he thought the footpath could be improved. But Ulful wasn’t convinced and continued to shout.

Another villager, George, had been there since the very first days of the settlement. He said that falling into the shit had never done him any harm. In his opinion, the kids of today would benefit from being smeared in shit now and then. He pointed out that none of these new-fangled footpaths had been tried in this village before, and as far as he was concerned the electricity was a mistake too and he wasn’t convinced about the mains sewage. Furthermore, he remembered when it was all fields round here and (contd. p94)

Elisabetta the Fair was not quite as venerable as George. In fact, she had arrived in the village long after the wise villagers had started telling people about their hope of building a new footpath. Despite that, she had spent many hours since then lovingly combing and tending one particular stretch of shit. She was proud that her shit was the best-tended in the whole village and was upset, nay, hysterical, that someone was going to build a proper footpath over it.

One last villager, Antonio - who nobody recognised but who seemed awfully self-assured - said he had a Magic Hovercraft which floated above the footpath and prevented him from falling in the shit. No-one quite understood how this worked and they didn’t think he was prepared to lend the Magic Hovercraft to anyone else, either. But he ranted on so long and so loudly that no-one else could hear themselves think anyway.

Eventually, the wise villagers grew downhearted, and sadly returned their footpath construction books to the library shelves. The books rest there still, unread and covered in cobwebs.

What the wise villagers hadn’t realised is that thousands of other settlers had come to hear them talk about the new footpath. But they were blocked from view, because Ulful and George and Antonio were continually jumping up and down in front of them, shouting all the while.

None of the thousands could get a word in edgeways, and they were sad about that, because they didn’t really like falling in the shit. They trooped back to their homes dejectedly, realising they were condemned to a life of falling in the shit.

Indeed, today, the villagers are still slipping over and falling into the shit. The hopes of the elders that the village might become a great city have come to naught. New villages were founded with proper footpaths, and they are the ones that have becoming thriving metropolises.

And no-one, to this day, has yet laid their eyes on Antonio’s Magic Hovercraft.

Nick - can we not have the conference in Amsterdam next year please - those drugs Matt gave me are taking a really long time to wear off.

Credit where credit’s due

2009-11-09T13:51:00.000-08:00

One of the questions I am often asked is “Great Leader, how should I attribute OpenStreetMap on my iPhone app?”

My answer is of course that Cloudmade will be more than willing to take care of all your attribution worries for a modest monthly subscription to our tile service.

Unfortunately some guys at failing Web 1.0 properties are not smart enough to avail themselves of our service. So just for you guys, because I’m not Evil, I’m going to explain OSM attribution for you free gratis and for nothing.

The crucial point to remember is that our license requires you to credit everyone. Yes, every single contributor who has made a Substantial contribution to OSM.

Now the copyright bores on legal-talk will drone for England (Oxford usually) on what Substantial means. But it is actually really simple.

If you just move one street, or add a roundabout, or map a whole city which unfortunately happens to be in Germany, that clearly isn’t Substantial.

However if for example you establish a world-changing open mapping project, secure €2.6m in VC from genuinely nice guys, and spread the OSM gospel to the four corners of the world via a punishing flight schedule that would make even Ol' Ed blanch, then that is a Substantial contribution and you deserve credit, as well as a free holiday somewhere hot and a lifetime’s supply of designer eyewear.

Happily OSM only has a small number of such contributors, well one in fact, which makes attribution much easier. Let me give you some free examples.

A good example is the OSM signup email, the first thing any new mapper sees. This gets right to the point by mentioning the Substantial Contributor in 11 different languages. Turns out I’m the fundator, the grondlegger and in Germany, the Gründer. I may have to get Nick to check that last one out. I think the Germans might be taking the piss.

An example of how not to do it is ‘OpenStreetMap: die freie Weltkarte nutzenkatzenjammerhermanngoering’, a book by some Germans. This only mentions the Substantial Contributor in Appendix VII, on page 164, which is patently not “reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing”. And even then it calls me an Erfinder. The bastards.

So now you know who to attribute, you just need to know how. Just copy and paste this handy logo into your iPhone app.

Your choice, baby

2009-08-31T10:14:00.000-07:00

So some snotty-nosed punk from some unsuccessful geodata startup sneers at our data:

CEO Noam Bardin is wary of the OSMs licensing and would rather start from scratch.

Unfortunately CEO Noam Bardin is also about to have his ass kicked halfway to Palestine and back. Good luck on "doing our best to incorporate your feedback into the upcoming release", apparently there's still some Netscape engineers in a room somewhere in Mountain View who've been doing the same since 1997.

Our sales line is open 24 hours, Noam.

Rails Disambiguation Guide For OSM Developers

2009-08-27T09:57:00.000-07:00

So apparently the server weekend had some hiccups because the admin guys kept installing the wrong type of rails. Tsch, these devs, hey?

Even though it’s three years since I did any development I can still teach you whippersnappers a thing or two. Let me make it clear.

1. Rails (Servers)
Installation instructions are either missing or bear no relation to reality. Obscure configuration (weird lever, black catch). Regularly jam. Server works much better without them. Much less annoying solutions exist.

2. Rails (Ruby)
Installation instructions are either missing or bear no relation to reality. Obscure configuration (gems, environments). Regularly jams. Server works much better without it. Much less annoying solutions exist.

You see, no confusion at all. HTH.

Harry saves CloudMade

2009-07-24T08:21:00.001-07:00

So you might have heard the news that we had to lay off our community ambassadors (you know, the guys we employ, not the ones in Kiev who actually pay for the privilege of working for me).

So I'm really sad about this. As you know, I'm all heart. But some of my 26 fellow CM executives are less cuddly and did the math on how many contributions our ambassadors were bringing in.

300 new school mappers (thanks Sarah)
+ 250 OSMers energized by lol-tastic SOTM speech (thanks Dirk)
+ 1 super-productive super-happy SteveC (thanks Hurricane)
- 58 bulk imports that would have been done by crschmidt (thanks Russ)

Divide into 6,370,031km of highways
= US mapped in 238,764 years

So when I explained to the board that our US streetmap would now ship in AD 240772 rather than the previously promised 2010, they got a bit antsy.

Fortunately Harry - you know, the tall blonde guy from some place beginning with N, who isn't Andy - is going to save CloudMade. He's getting the community to go after those guys who leech OSM's tiles (like, the whole iPhone App Store) and hammer them for license infringement. So when Harry says:

There's a bunch of paid-for iPhone apps springing up which use our maps and our tile servers, and don't credit OpenStreetMap at all. Break out the red text for those kinds of things.

"Break out the red text" is kind of wikispeak for "get medieval on their ass". Think of it as crowd-sourced vigilanteism. And then our hardcore sales team moves in for the kill - every app that OSMers block from the tileserver is a new client for CloudMade. Epic win I think.

Occasionally Juha asks me why we don't just develop our own iPhone apps, so raking in the money while building our brand. I explain to him that the ecosystem is more important, and he nods sagely, deep in thought. It's a good job VC guys always take a long-term view.

Farewell community guys, we'll miss you. Much love. Namaste.

Meet & Greet

2009-07-11T16:16:00.000-07:00

Having an awsome time at this year's SOTM, it's bigger brighter better faster than anything we had before! (Some wannabe national chapters claim they'll get 400 visitors for their first conference next year but that's rubbish of course.)

Speaking of Germany, I was taken aback by the EPIC FAIL that was the "State of Germany" talk yesterday - it completely failed to mention the most thrilling thing that happened to the Krautsourcing community in the last 12 months, which was clearly the meet & greet tour that me and my fian^Wemployee embarked on in May. The community just loved it, and basically requested that I post more on talk-de, which of course I did. One of my fan-crowd later sent me this picture and I really think it should have been in the presentation. Prepare for more of this in
the near future.

See you in the pub!

Twitter

2009-07-10T00:56:00.001-07:00

@fakestevec

OSMF Chairman Sweepstake

2009-06-18T17:09:00.001-07:00

So as my three-year term as chairman comes to an end, let me give you a run-down of the leading contenders to not succeed me in this important role. It’s important to know who the lucky guy will be with the accolade of coming second in the ballot and you can bet there’ll be no other topic of conversation at SOTM. Well you can bet if you like. You haven’t seen what I’m announcing in my keynote yet.

While we’re on the subject, let me point out that the recent dramatic increase in OSMF membership in the Ukraine is because those guys are so enthused about mapping. Ballot-rigging just isn't in their nature, they know of nothing but free and fair elections. Anyway.

The candidates

Peter Miller. Almost certainly formulating a Use Case for chairmanship of OSMF as we speak. Would change O in OSM from Open to Ontology. Leadership posters to be pasted on bus stops across Britain. 6 to 1.

RichardF. Would impose socialist five-year plan on OSM. Likely to duplicate most OSMF positions, not intentionally but due to a bug in Potlatch. Liable to go postal if elected to Licence Working Group. 20 to 1.

Mike Collinson. Probably also a socialist. Never trust anyone with the PD symbol on their wiki page. Especially not:

Frederik. Thinks he can rely on the support of the German masses to assure him of the position, fortunately no longer the case thanks to our recent hearts and minds mission (in short: appeal to the hormones of 17-year old Linux freaks by sending over CM HOT BABES). 5 to 1.

Iván Sánchez Ortega. Knows his way around NMAs, smart on copyright, good coder, really nice guy. Would make an excellent OSMF chairman. Therefore, far too sane to ever consider standing. 200 to 1.

Andy Blackadder. Showing dangerous signs of independence recently. Appears to be allied with the insurrectionist Sustrans faction in OSM - what is it with those guys? Memo to Nick: throw some more mapping party work his way. 10 to 1.

Nick?

Hello?

Shit.

Nick B. Why didn’t I see this one coming? Don’t the backroom brains behind the organisation always try to take over? What if our German expedition was secretly researching how best to organise a putsch? Shit.

This is starting to hack me off

2009-06-10T03:12:00.000-07:00

So Nick wants feature requests for our products. I've got a request - fix the damn routing already. This is getting expensive.

Do these mapper guys not realise that Admiral Insurance don't accept "way 987345 and 8653425 were mistakenly joined without a layer tag" as a valid reason for driving your car into a river? Trust me, they don't.

Trolling, moi?

2009-05-13T01:43:00.000-07:00

I'm deeply hurt by the suggestion that OSM people have been trolling the Google Mapmaker discussion group. You certainly wouldn't catch me doing something like that. Perhaps some other OSM users can help me in trolling^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H refuting the allegation.

Update: HARRY PWNS GOOGLE

Last damn time I trust CM routing

2009-05-01T12:47:00.000-07:00

(thx FakeMapGuy)

New CEO appointed

2009-04-01T03:07:00.000-07:00

Hey.

So I’ve not blogged much recently but that’s because at CloudMade we’re doing moar stuff ftw than ever before (I must stop stretching these memes, it’s getting painful). Obviously it’s all super-secret stuff that I can’t tell the community about, but I figure the loyal readers of this blog are entitled to a preview. So:

Our editor is almost ready. Really. Having distracted RichardF with API 0.6, Frederik with ODbL, and the Merkaartor guys with Stefan de Konink, the three incumbents have been in feature stasis for months now which means we can blow them away with a mere flick of the toolbar. We’ve actually hired the People’s Map guys to write our editor - we wanted people who really understand the user experience. But more on that at Where 2.0.
Location is everywhere. It's all about pervasive geocontext. CloudMade is dedicated to pushing the boundaries so we have 30 people working on geocontext. We don’t actually know what it means yet but we’re determined that when someone invents it, we’ll be there first.
We don’t just aim to reinvent mapping. Oh no. We set our sights high and so we also have a plan to reinvent the Internet. The existing infrastructure is just not fast enough for the increasing demands of the 21st century (e.g. cycle-map tiles, Map Features page, long anguished e-mails about ODbL) so we need a speedier replacement. Our new Internet will solve this. All packets will be delivered by shaunmcdonald on his bike.
Midnight Commander is not just meant to look like the Matrix. It is the Matrix. It’s set up in my basement on a 40in plasma screen and I do have a five-year plan for world domination. “No, Mr Ramm, I expect you to die” - you know the drill.

But I realise that, even for someone like me who is able to be in three continents at the same time - oh did I mention we were working on that too? - this is a bit of a stretch. Take this posting for example - I set myself a deadline of midday for this and I’ll only just make it. I have to give something up.

Also some of our wonderful community has been muttering (in German) about conflict of interest, or as Google Translate has it, “blitzkrieg of hobby”. Personally I don’t agree but I'll let it pass in the interests of community cohesion - as you know shitting on active members of the community and telling them they're worthless has never been my style.

Also I need to take some time out to instil discipline in the troops, what with Matt and Andy promoting insurrection on legal-talk and ymca-discuss and who-knows-what about ODbL. The shtick to the investors that “we need ODbL because it gives us certainty” kind of wears off when our own super-intelligent techies keep posting that they don’t understand it.

So I’m stepping down as Chairman of OSMF at this year’s elections - my three years are up and I’ve decided not to seek reelection. Instead we’ve decided to replace the Chairman post with that of CEO - paid staff for OSMF is one of our top priorities and this is the obvious place to start.

Now you’d be A Fool if you did this without any succession planning so I’m pleased to announce our preferred candidate will be SFan00. Those of you who don’t read #osm might not be familiar with him but I’m sure you’ll find his enthusiastic style will ingratiate him with you immediately. Indeed Mr Fan is equally intelligible in every language so the German guys will love him right from the off. He even says “ftw” now and then although we think this is probably a spelling mistake for something else. It’s going to be an exciting time.

The Future of Communications is Happening Here

2009-03-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

I've been blogging about the cool things we're doing at CloudMade. (Our editor is almost ready. AS3 FTW!) But as the chairman of the board of OSMF, I am often asked: "Steve, what are the cool things in the OSMF pipeline? Any surprises in store for us on the community side?"

Now I can't of course share our full 5-year plan of world domination with you (Nick came up with the fashionable OSM 2014 tag for it) but a key pillar of this is going to be a radical communications revamp. You have already seen how we're gradually replacing mailing lists with telephone conferences. But there's more! I have heard your complaints about the Wiki and they are all true - the hardware is meagre, the software is crap, and the users, well, I've promised Nick not to throw the talk-de trouble makers any more bones. The good news is, we're going to replace the Wiki with a full-colour, monthly membership magazine that is delivered to your door, free of charge, courtesy of CloudMade sponsoring! I have three CloudMade designers working round the clock on this assignment and their beta results are awsome. You'll absolutely love the centrefold design they came up with. I'll let Nick be the editor-in-chief and he has promised me space for a monthly philosophy column.

And before the naysayers complain: There's absolutely no reason to be worried. We will carry at least half a page of letters to the editor. In each issue. Promise.

The CloudMade difference

2009-02-24T02:31:00.000-08:00

Sometimes people ask me "Steve, what does CloudMade bring to the OpenStreetMap party that OSM can't do for itself?". And my answer is, hot babes.

The dude on the left is old-school OpenStreetMap. The hot babe is CloudMade. Being committed OSMers, they are of course both awsome and both have seriously awsome names, but only one of them looks like Richard Stallman.

(If you do know how to crowdsource hot babes, perhaps you could tell our product development team. We think it could be the killer app for the Slashdot crowd.)

How awsome am I?

2009-02-12T06:22:00.000-08:00

So not many of you know that CloudMade also has an awsome data analysis team that works on future geo industry trends. I don't mind admitting I was once a bit of a n00b at all of this so when Nick told me "we need some serious geo intel", I started opening up our PCs and ripping out the AMDs.

But all that's changed and we now have dudes working on what's happening before it happens. I'm going to be announcing the first such product at our London launch event this evening but you lucky guys get to see it first.

So we like to start with big overview stuff, and this first product is a swingometer assessing the strength of the geo industry. Obviously I don't want to give away too much about the extreme analysis magic behind it but suffice it to say that if you're following the latest in SteveC goodness you'll already have read the source..... and it's FULLY compliant.

Hey--if you're reading this by RSS or planet openstreetmap you'll need to open the FSC blog for the full awsome swingometer effect.

Moar products!

2009-02-06T03:35:00.000-08:00

[Nick - check with Matt or one of the Ukrainian cool kids I’m using the meme right - okay thanks bye!!!]

So our SF launch was amazing, check out the twitter buzz. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=cloudmade

Very few technical hitches, considering. I did ask Andy Allen why the cycle route planner sent me on circuitous routes up mountains, over fences, down alleyways and along dirt tracks, but he informed me that Sustrans routes are meant to be like that, and furthermore could I please get back to pestering Mick Jagger’s PA as I was distracting him from some important blogging he had to do.

Anyway I’ll let the products speak for themselves.

Routing

CM routing is moar detailed than any other routing engine available! Imagine the arguments you can have with your girlfriend when she turns left after only 32m. (If you had a girlfriend.)

See the power of crowd-sourced map data! You wouldn't get results of this quality with Google.

Style editor

See what you can do with our style editor!

Geocoding and geosearch

CM search is the only product on the market that matches the awsome speed of the OSM namefinder!

Oh yeah.

Remember how Google announced nothing of significance at Where 2.0 but then dropped the bomb a month later? I’m just saying, is all.

You'll need this

2009-02-05T06:32:00.001-08:00

So it occurs to me that some of you following my world-changing presentation via satellite linkup might not understand how we work at CM.

Juha has approved that we release our organogram to the public. I think it makes it clear who does the real work.

CloudMade make blogs differently

2009-02-05T03:19:00.000-08:00

YES YES YES it’s my big day YES YES YES

PUMP. HARDER. PUMP. HARDER.

TWENTY. TWENTY-ONE. TWENTY-TWO.

I’m SO psyched. I’m so FUCKING psyched. I am SO fucking hot right now.

Punchbag. Gimme that punchbag.

*thud* - Google
*thud* - Microsoft
*thud* - Yahoo [Hang on, don’t we like them? - Nick]

I rise above the haters. Today you see Steve Rampant, rising glorious from the flames, in excelsis mapso. I am revived. Maps course through my veins.

I think no longer about trivialities. Mails and Rails, patches, Potlatchs and dispatches.rb. All that is for the worker ants.

I can map using only my consciousness and my clearly expressed desire. One tweet and the world invisibly shapes itself around my will. I merely have to say the word MAPS and another city falls into line. MAPS. MAPS. You see. Oceans fall and mountains drift as SRTM voids shape reality. MAPS.

Tomorrow there are two realities, three realities, four realities all expressed through my Style Editor. Tomorrow the world routes itself through the highways, byways, roads and rails of my vision. Earth shall fall and Cloud shall envelop all the lands.

PUMP. HARDER. PUMP. HARDER. MAPS. MAPS. PUMP. HARDER.

place=farm, turkeys=yes

2008-12-23T14:22:00.001-08:00

Season's greetings to all. Promise me to map as at least as much in 2009 as you did in 2008, and I promise to let you peek into the world of the rich and famous every now and then. We didn't get to finish OpenSantaMap in time (see Wiki page) so you probably still need to be on Google maps if you want anything but I'm sure Christmas '09 will be ruled by OSM.

Keep up the good work!

Yours
FSC.

Public Domain Madness

2008-12-23T11:23:00.000-08:00

God knows I have tried to rid the world of the evil that is the so-called "public domain". This is my project, folks, and contrary to what you may have read in the press, this project is not "license-free", and you cannot "do anything you want" with my the data.

I have hired a bunch of OSM ambassadors who now roam the States and generally do a good job of slowly moving us away from the original "public domain" TIGER data. Soon, my license will rule the world!

I'm a bit concerned about this Sunburned Surveyor guy though. First I thought I could let them do their own friggin' public domain whatever map and coordinate using a Yahoo list, but then one of my wisecrack Foundation directors pointed out that there's nothing in the statutes that says OSM is the only free map project we support so I had to give way there. (I made sure nobody will find them though, they're at "legal-general" - who would ever guess that that's the name for the PD talk list!) That much and not further, I thought, but meanwhile they seem to have got hosting from Telascience, and what frightens me most is that they actually managed to log in to their server! As if that was not enough, it seems that they have also uncovered my business secret of using relational databases to store, well, data. I should have got that patented when I started.

Speaking of patents, some lousy bastard told the legal-talk nitpickers that I was going to buy myself trademarks for OSM and the logo, and now I'm in trouble. I mean, we all know that the foundation must never get these trademarks, otherwise they could be carpetbagged by Evil Ed and suddenly CloudMade would not be allowed to say "OSM" without also favourably mentioning GMaps or so. But they don't understand that I'm only acting in their own best interest... just because Larry Sonsini is a pal of mine doesn't mean I'm going to pull a TWiki for god's sake!

I might have to hand over the trademarks to the foundation in the end. I tell you, sometimes it feels like I have a veritable palace revolution brewing there. I recently told them that I bloody well expect them to remain silent about foundation business in public, and what did they do? They promptly resolved that all foundation business was public unless explicitly declared secret. It felt like a slap in the face and I was about to climb the table and shout "who's the boss here" but then remembered that it was only a phone conference so I couldn't impress them with that. It'll have to wait.

Best
FSC

We always knew...

2008-07-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

We always suspected that China wasn't the best place to be for mappers. But nothing prepared us for this chilling first-hand account of Chinese hardship!

Accra

2008-07-20T10:49:00.000-07:00

On behalf of the OpenStreetMap Foundation I today wish to offer the most sincere apologies to the good people of Accra. I take personal responsibility for the environmental disasters that were brought upon them by malice, ignorance, or plain use of Potlatch, effected by the OpenStreetMap public over the course of the past months and years.

Flotsam of all kind is being washed up on Ghana's shores, with Accra being hardest hit because it is closest to the source of the problem, only a few hundred kilometres off shore. Bits and pieces of roads, buildings, the interior decoration of a whole supermarket, and most recently a good thousand of unaccompanied nodes and two barrels of m*shed potatoes, are carelessly dumped to sea, turning the area into the world's rubbish bin.

I have personally surveyed the damage and told them the Foundation would throw all its weight behind efforts to improve the situation. (I've also made plans to notch up the Foundation's weight a few stones by replacing one of the skinny guys with someone from the States but I can't tell you more right now, it's supposed to be a democratic process you know.)

So, folks, this totally has to stop. No more using lat=0,lon=0 for tests. I promised it to the Ghanans. They were so impressed, they even named one of their towns after El Coasto. So please. At least use -0,-0 instead, which is on the other side of the world (or so I'm told).

Flowers. Peace & Love

2008-07-16T18:09:00.000-07:00

Oh well. I'm sorry. So the prospect of having to shuttle into dreary Limerick from my California mansion had me a bit depressed there. I had just e-mailed my letter of resignation to Cloudmade, said goodbye to my captive audience (that's you!), and suspended my accounts on Flickr, Dopplr and the dozen other new age services I'm on. I was about to nuke the opengeodata blog and prepare my final message to the 23 OSM mailing lists, but got distracted trying to find the right words for my friends at talk-de when Nick's henchmen bundled me into a helicopter and gave me something that made me see flowers.

Conference was good, lots of flowers in Ireland. Thankfully Nick had prepared a few slides for my keynote on Sunday. Escapes me what technical stuff our Ukrainian wizards are building but Andy fed me the right keywords so I managed. People threw flowers at me.
And Ed: I'd still be hating you for not buying the IoM data from us last year, if it hadn't been for all the flowers.

Anyway, so I'm about to head back to the West Coast, on my mission of trying to get them tigertards to map the occasional park and footway. With fuel at 4.50 bucks per gallon you'll have to at least think about using footways, I tell them. They're a bit slow in accepting English superiority but I'm the lead dog in this territory (spot my markings, ha). I asked Nick when I'll be allowed back to the London office but he said there's many other countries to evangelise in after I'm done with the US and there wasn't anything useful I could do at home anyway...

Unnecessary with the wisecrack commentary

2008-07-10T02:59:00.000-07:00

So, my friends, it's time for me to leave you. I know you were looking forward to my SOTM report. I know you're gagging for more instruction on how to crowdsource bikeshed painting, for more lolmaps and l337 People's Map exploits, for graphs with rockets and APIs with clue. But, well, some things are beyond parody, and I feel my work here is done.

But end of statement doesn't mean end of FSC. Oh no.

This kinda shit's our calling, had no choice
Doin' it for free like the Village Voice

So when "disruptive" shades to "mischievous" shades to "trouble-making"; when you're taken out by a stray bullet seemingly from nowhere; when some unseen bit of code suddenly appears and bites all your best-laid plans in the ass... look for the swashbucklin' silhouette of Fake SteveC disappearing round the corner.

Love you all. Have fun.

The Gospel According To FSC

2008-06-30T06:30:00.000-07:00

So those crazy hippie guys over at Fortius One have the first ever interview with yours truly. Much love to Sean. They interviewed some other guy too, what's that all about?

Everything in moderation

2008-06-30T02:39:00.000-07:00

"My addition to a Cablecar terminal in Nha Trang has just been denied. How can I explain to moderator that YOU don't have any category matched with CABLE CAR TERMINAL. Why don't you give me a chance to explain and help me correcting it?"

"I don't know what standards are your categories, but look, it don't have PAGODA (don't say that I must use Church if I want to show it a Pagoda), you don't have Publishing House, Factory. The School is not divided into 3 or more subcategories, just LKG and UKG, something that I can't understand. I know that you guys in US have Elementary, Lower High School and Higher High School, that is the same in Vietnam, why don't you use it?"

"i am having similar problems editing Karachi,Pakistan, moderator simply deny changes and don't give a chance to explain or clarify or listen to my point of view.. i know my area well more then the moderator moderating so atleast listen or have some option to contact or message the user who deny changes so that we could understand what exactly we did wrong and why it was denied !"

"I just began editing 2 days ago for my hometown, but I'm feeling that moderators are like God in the heaven, can't touch, must obey."

Have fun. If they let you.

My philosophy (no. 5)

2008-06-24T08:28:00.000-07:00

All your map are belong to us

2008-06-24T03:14:00.000-07:00

In AD 2008, war was beginning.

Frederik: What happen?
TomH: Somebody set us up the Googlebomb.
80n: We get signal.
Frederik: Excellent, the NaviGPS is working for once then.
80n: Main API turn on.
[downloading 1533 nodes/10,000,000]
Frederik: It's you!!
Ed: How are you gentlemen!! (and Morwen)
Ed: All your map are belong to us.
Ed: You are on the way to destruction.
Frederik: What you say!!
Ed: You have no chance to survive make your map. With new Google MapMaker™.
Ed: Ha ha ha ha...
80n: Captain!!
Frederik: Take off every TAG!!
Frederik: You know what you doing (with the exception of Sfan00).
Frederik: Move nodes.
Frederik: For great justice.

My philosophy (no. 4)

2008-06-09T13:01:00.000-07:00

My philosophy (no. 3)

2008-06-05T02:24:00.000-07:00

My philosophy (no. 2)

2008-06-04T03:50:00.001-07:00

My philosophy (no. 1)

2008-06-03T02:19:00.000-07:00

Google

2008-05-14T03:07:00.000-07:00

So you should have seen us before the G session. The atmosphere in the auditorium was electric (damn wifi frying my head) as we all panicked about whose business model Google was about to obliterate. At least three people told me the Navteq guys were in the Parsons VIP Bar downing daiquiris anticipating the imminent annihilation of the freetards in favour of a Navteq-derived world.

And it turns out that the big news is that ESRI is adding "Save as KML" to some future version of ArcGIS.

Colour me really unimpressed.

So I don't actually know anyone who uses ArcGIS so I asked around if we should be worried about this, because I don't see it, somehow. Turns out the only people in OSM who've ever used it are the cartographers and they say ArcGIS's export functions are laughably bad - apparently ESRI don't really understand the difference between pixels and vectors so you get an Illustrator file with every diagonal neatly converted to a series of 10m steps, of some data you don't have the rights to anyway. Congratulations Jack, you just became the first person in the world to successfully sell Google a pup.

Just ask yourself this - if it's so world-changing, how come it's only a point release?

Of course there was some collateral damage to neotards like Platial and Mapufacture in the new geosearch stuff but, sorry guys, I did warn you.

All of which means we have another year to reinforce our tank traps. It's going to be fun.

(Mad props to John for the live blog. Next Scoble. Definitely.)

Live from Where 2.0

2008-05-13T05:35:00.000-07:00

Hey. So I'm in SF for the big Where 2.0 shindig. Actually Where's not as fun as it used to be - but then it never was - now that the corporate tards have discovered location (thanks Ed). But I figured I should keep coming if only for appearance sake, given that all this lovely VC cash sloshing around means I have to cloak my iconoclasm in a veneer of corporateness these days.

(memo to self - must ask Nick what iconoclasm means. is it something in Ukrainian?)

And there are still some great guys here, Mikel managed to persuade the UN it's a disaster zone (bit of an exaggeration, those are pretty gruesome jeans but I don't think they need international intervention quite yet) so they're paying for him, and of course John McK's a corporate drone at the Borg these days so he fits right in.

So you can read Brady Forrest if you just want point-by-point details of what's happening at Where and there's probably some freetard in the audience with an iPhone knockoff live-blogging it all. But that's not why you come here, you want insight and analysis and liberal use of the word "fuckwit", and, hey, who am I to disappoint?

Yahoo

Biggest news so far is that Y! have launched WOEID. Ok, I feel really guilty about this.

Basically the OSM deal with Y! is that we swap their imagery for our cred and expertise, you know that already. So every time Y! get some new hi-res imagery I do a day's consulting for them.

I was a bit busy last month setting up CloudMade's new NYC office so couldn't actually get to Sunnyvale, so I had to send this messenger guy from Brooklyn across with my advice. Unfortunately it kinda got lost in translation and when I said "you'll get geo cred if you have some more freetards" it actually came across as "free TOIDs", so Y! have ended up copying Ed's big crazy idea that no-one uses.

Anyway, let's see what the other goys come up with. Top topic of conversation is whose lawn Google are parking their tanks on this year and I have to say that the odds on OSM are pretty high. More later.

Real artists ship

2008-05-09T09:36:00.000-07:00

I'm begging you. Please. Someone. Put these guys out of their misery.

On osgeo-discuss right now they're wanking about wanking, which is way too meta and kind of illustrates my original point that "Real artists ship. For everyone else there's standards wanking".

Unfortunately they're so far into their vinegar strokes that, not only are they discussing my aphorism earnestly with furrowed brows, they appear to think it's solely my coinage.

And - call me humble, but - I can't live with the thought that, in the Penguin Dictionary of Bon Mots Libres, I might deprive a little-known figure from the early 80s of his rightful credit for "real artists ship".

Please, someone tell them. It's breaking my heart.

Technical documentation for OSM API 0.6

2008-05-06T04:21:00.001-07:00

We've got some stick for not documenting the hack weekend properly. Now feedback reaches me from the weekend that this blog is already considered the premier news channel for OSM, so I figured, where better to write it up than here?

So you can now do stuff with users, like associate the id with the username, but there's more. In particular we've added some social stuff

PUT /api/0.6/user/Sfan00/clue

helps you impart clue to mappers, it's much more efficient than the current messaging system.

Obviously this is fully RESTful so we'll also be supporting

GET /api/0.6/user/SteveC/clue

so my fans can benefit from my years of accumulated wisdom.

Don't ask what the DELETE method does, it's at the far reaches of ethics and we've got to get Jordan to look into the legal side before it goes live.

Also we're introducing changesets. Now we've written some stuff on the wiki about this being necessary for revert and integrity and all that.

Actually this is all a smokescreen and it's come out of my discussions with Mikel about the Cyprus problem. Basically we're using it to implement a bozo filter. When a bozo commits a changeset, it's automatically tagged with "bozo=yes" and no-one else can view it - only him. When he goes back into JOSM or Potlatch or that other one with the bolshie developer, it all shows up for him, so he doesn't suspect.

We've been testing this for a while, so if you ever wonder why your changes aren't showing up on the main map, it's probably because you're a bozo.

(The other good thing about this is it lets us support editing by horses in the future.)

Finally, by popular request we're also going to be supporting WMS, I've done most of the code for this already

def wms
sleep 15.0
puts "503 Service Unavailable"
end

we consider all your disagreements are all invalid

2008-04-29T01:42:00.001-07:00

If you haven't seen this wiki page I really really encourage you to do so. Voting is currently 0 for, 11 against and yet he ploughs on undaunted, like a Ukrainian tractor. This guy is just awsome, we're trying to get him to keynote State of the Map.

In Soviet Russia, features request you

2008-04-27T14:13:00.000-07:00

Hey.

Good to be back with my adoring public, I've been racking up the DOPPLR! miles and haven't had much time to post.

So you might not realise this but we've set up a Cloud Made office in Kiev, and over the last few weeks we've been shuttling back and forth on Crazhalot - what used to be the Ukrainian arm of Aeroflot but they rebranded.

We've hired the finest programmers in the Ukraine, and these guys are HOT. I mean, as hot as a stolen collective tractor. They all learned on samizdat ZX Spectrums made in Ust-Kamenogorsk back in the 1980s. So when we said "mapping party" - and they counted there weren't enough Navis to go round - within two hours they'd cloned a whole Garmin etrex and put JOSM in the firmware and a little Rails server. I'm telling you, they're good.

Actually the mapping party went pretty well, have a look. Nick's the polymath so he's been doing the rounds with the Cyrillic street signs, as far as I know they're probably directing me to South Bumfuck, Lithuania but he seems to have it under control. I've been doing the whole Great Leader shtick and the Ukrainian guys seem to find it comforting. In fact I swear I heard one of them call me Stalin which is a compliment, I think.

And did I mention Andy 'cyclemap' Allan's our tech lead now? He seemed to find it all a bit disconcerting at first, but we brought along a load of little blue cycle route arrows and stuck them on signs in utterly random directions, and he feels much more at home now.

So I've been talking to some of the OSM community about this and they all say, hey, El Coasto, why Kiev?

Well there's the cheap booze and the hot coders and it's not on Google, that's three good reasons. And let's face it it's more exotic than Reigate, and it's closer to London than Oxfordshire is.

But basically it's because there's no word for "should" in Ukrainian.

I shit you not. You try and say "We should have a testbed dev server" and it comes out as "на хуй срака dev server", which Nick tells me translates as "I kindly volunteer to set up dev server, it will be done in 15 minutes". You say "We should have nested relations and a fixed ontology to give our data hierarchical structure, without which it is useless", and it translates as "холера! узни мене шлюха, PostGIS шлях трафуть", i.e. "but of course! I realise how these assertions are meaningless without proof and rather irritating. So I will have comprehensive set of benchmarks for you in five minutes".

It means OSM development gets done so much quicker. You might wonder why there aren't many messages on talk-ua. In fact there isn't a talk-ua. They just get on and do it.

We have one guy called Arjam Munroski who can't open his mouth without promising some new features. You should see his working copy of the rails port. It does actually have a spaceship.

¿Qué diablos? aka What. The. Fuck.

2008-04-08T16:02:00.000-07:00

http://geo.topf.org/comparison/index.html?mt0=googlemap&mt1=mapnik&lon=-0.343705&lat=39.48158&z=17

Update: this is even better

New Professional SteveC

2008-03-31T02:28:00.000-07:00

All this VC funding means I've got to get serious. No more 'have fun', from now on it's a strictly professional sign-off.

Also I've been advised it's no longer appropriate to call people fuckwits. Apparently 'tards' is ok though. So I reckon that gives me the right to call people fucktards.

Best

Get with the programme

2008-03-25T04:41:00.000-07:00

So Ed is half right and half wrong.

Half wrong (and not just for the awsome misspelling): "your only open when you're losing". What this actually means is that when you're open you can't lose. By definition. But Ed knows that.

Half right: Ed goes to the freetard gathering (that's us) to get ideas. Smart move. This is why Google and Ed are dominating the geosphere and no-one else is anywhere to be seen, apart from us and maybe Apple have some secret stuff in a lab somewhere.

Yes, the smart guys have figured how crowdsourcing their R&D gets better results and you don't even have to pay for it. So in the spirit of being open here's some hints for other geospatial d00ds on how to monetise the freetard community, from someone who knows. No charge.

Vanessa Lawrence: Ed knew you're going to have to open up, and admit it, you know it too. So give away the cheap stuff and keep Mastermap to yourself. Announce some sort of partnership with us, it'll win over the /. crowd and give you kudos in Government - so DCLG is more likely to pony up for you to map Monmouthshire - while essentially meaning fuck all. Drop the NC clause on Openspace, it makes you look stupid (everyone uses GMaps anyway) and gives the typotards at the Grauniad even more reason to grumble. Speaking of who:

Charles Arthur : Read some economics books, hippy.

Oh, and you might want to bid for serialisation rights on Sean's autobiog.

Jack Dangermouse, ESRI: Wow. You guys are still here? I guess you could open a museum or something.

No, I've got a better idea. Open source some old version of ARCwank that no-one uses. It will make no difference to anyone but the OSGeo guys will implode from the excitement and you'll be doing us a huge favour.

Tristram da Cunha or whatever the fuck that guy at Getmapping is called: Give us the imagery. This one is so obvious I'm almost amazed you haven't done it yet. We cook up some dual licensing stuff for the tracings, so you have the data under do-what-the-fuck-you-want-to conditions and we have it under whatever license we're using that week. We get our Germans to do the reproj into something sane and the hosting, no cost to you. End result is that you get the data three millennia quicker than relying on five people from Basingstoke using the People's Map, and you can still sell it to other guys with beards for much moolah. Come on.

Yahoo: Clearly the Borg will close YMaps and replace it with a skin on VE, just like Multimap, so you might as well go for scorched earth. Now even the ever optimistic El Coasto can't see your lawyers ok'ing a rerelease of the entire TeleAtlas dataset for free... but your code, well that's a different matter.

As you well know all your lovingly crafted render code is going to be subject to rm -rf / as soon as the Microtards move in - actually, no, it'll be del *.*, they still use 8.3 internally y'know - so, give it away and get the freetards on side. The worst that can happen is that someone actually starts using it so you all get lucrative consultancy jobs when the first Borg slice-and-dice hits Yahoo geo. If you're really lucky we might even hire you.

Oh yeah, and one more.

Ed: Don't be evil.

I can has venture capital?

2008-03-17T14:00:00.000-07:00

HELLO!!!!!!!!!??

This is a message from Real SteveC. Fake Real SteveC, that is.

Fake^H^H^H^HNick and I have just got €2.4 million to work on OSM.

€2,400,000. That's £1,800,000 for our UK readers and $3,800,000 plus California sales tax for our US readers (pending collapse of your economy, sorry about that). And we're going to give it to some of you guys for development work. And, like, none of you have even noticed.

So I know there are really important discussions to be had about aligning relations with the phase of the moon or some shit but DO YOU MAYBE THINK THIS DESERVES SOME COMMENT? I mean, talk about a bikeshed. Again.

It's up to you, I'm off down the Jolly Gardner. Get there in the next two hours and the drinks are on me. All €2,400,000 of them.

Separated at birth: Ed Parsons and Jeremy Hardy

2008-03-17T02:25:00.000-07:00

One is a clown who occasionally appears on Radio 4, the other is a panellist on the News Quiz.

Hope you like jamming too

2008-02-26T10:49:00.000-08:00

Turns out Google are getting worried already.

First they try to get a bit of the OSM magic by organising a party. I don't know what Google mapping parties are like but I imagine a bunch of people all congregate on one area to not map footpaths.

But in news just in, it turns out that the UK government is jamming GPS signals.

So they claim this is to do with security but that's the excuse for everything these days - last time El Coasto made a complaint at Tesco they blamed a security alert, which is alright but I was only asking why there was no broccoli. Anyway here's the skinny:

MoD [Ministry of Defence] trials have taken place in a number of areas including Lincolnshire, Wales, Scotland and Cornwall and have an effect over a range of approximately 11km. Details of the trials are 'restricted', but the Government says the trials are intended to research 'vulnerabilities in a range of military applications' of satellite navigation, although it has also been noted that the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory PR team have denied that such trials are taking place.

However, we are told that the HMCG [Coastguard] locally broadcast details of the trials, with timings, and a 'Notice to Airmen' was also published in Portreath, Cornwall.

Ok. And OSM's worst mapped areas are Lincolnshire, Wales, Scotland and Cornwall. I'm telling you, they want these places to stay unmapped.

Now I know the word "Google" doesn't appear in that story but, answer me this, do you think good ol' Ed burned all his bridges with the Government? And how far from Ordnance Survey head office is the Coastguard anyway...

This week on the OSM mailing lists

2008-02-24T14:48:00.001-08:00

So a lot of people don't subscribe to the talk list because it's too high volume. We used to have summary posts over on opengeodata, but then even the guys who wrote those ran away screaming and unsubscribed from the list, so that put an end to that. Anyway there's a few valiant list warriors still hanging in there, naturally including El Coasto in a starring role as King Of The Unimpressed One-liner, so I thought I'd bring you the highlight of the week.

So it's really important because this week we've had a debate on what colour to paint the bikeshed and also, this being OSM, how to tag the bikeshed. Now I know some of you guys are thinking that the top priority right now is rollback, maybe some better docs, sorting out the license, or our old favourite taking the piss out of the People's Map. No, the settled will of the OSM community is that this week we finally sort out the bikeshed problem once and for all.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to go put my head through a blender.

Early frontrunner for Tard Of The Year

2008-02-19T12:56:00.000-08:00

Hey. So we're instituting these OSM awards, we call them TOTYs - that's Tard Of The Year.

In future months I'm going to be sharing some of my nominations but to be honest I think our first candidate is going to be very hard to beat. Ladies and gentlemen a big hand gesture, plz, for Dimitri Rotorvator, CEO of Manifold.

According to Dimitri OSM is "yet another example of where open source technology is lagging commercial vendors":

My own view is that if OpenStreetMaps had any sense of practicality applied to the legalisms of the matter you would have not failed to pursue all of the bona fide, indisputably public domain sources of vector data. For example, there is the superb VMAP Level 1 data set at 1:250,000 scale that covers much more of the world (about a third) than the current set of Yahoo! imagery, and you don’t even need to digitize it yourself.

1:250k. Nice. I'll play with that when my super lo fidelity crayons arrive from Amazon and Potlatch allows me to edit at zoom level 6.

There's so many holes I could pick but I think I'll just crowdsource the flaming out to the community. But I can't resist this one final quote:

let me offer some specific suggestions to advance open source in GIS

Hey, Dimitri. Let me offer some specific suggestions to advance Manifold. Why don't you shove your topology up your arse and anal-yse it?

Google: start to worry

2008-02-13T09:19:00.000-08:00

So we were trying to work out what remaining things Google does better than us.

In favour of OSM:

More parties
More Germans
Less evil
Ability to deeply annoy WFS-Tards simply by some decision made in a pub three years ago

In favour of Google:

More beanbags
Own several Caribbean islands
Better aerial imagery

Frankly I can live without the beanbags, and our coastline guys are busy sending the Caribbean islands underwater. That just leaves the aerial imagery.

So look at this. Clicky on the ticky and select OpenAerialMap.

Awsome.

Obviously I can't say much more about our future plans for this, not least because I like to keep the bearded guys in Hartley Wintney guessing. But at this very moment one of our unmanned flyer drones is heading towards a palatial mansion in Teddington to do some close-up surveillance of a Good Ol' Geospatial Strategist.

(thanks to #osm for tipoff)

Free map of Wokingham

2008-01-29T06:04:00.000-08:00

So Ed is getting even more antsy about OpenStreetMap's poor coverage of Wokingham. Well Andy and I went for a quick blast on the way back from a meeting in Reading yesterday and we reckon we've got it licked. It was a bit of a rush so we had to use some out-of-copyright mapping as a base but we don't reckon anyone will notice. Happy now?

Welcome

2008-01-25T16:43:00.001-08:00

So after the "fantastic" "response" to last week's appeal I'd like to unveil our new co-author.

To qualify for Fake SteveC status you have to exhibit three characteristics: familiarity with the suffix "tard", ability to summarily dismiss others' bogus arguments, and overuse of the word "awsome" (one "e", please). Frederik qualifies on the first two counts and, well, he'll learn to be awsome. Also it's good to finally have the author of an editor on the team.

Frederik has been a coder since, like, 1969 so I'm hoping he might be able to explain to me the workings of Potlatch which is written in ALGOL or something. Also he doesn't take any shit from anyone which is the true hallmark of a real OSM fundamentalist (see also: TomH, morwen, and this crazy New Zealand guy who insists on posting incomprehensible shit about tags at 23.30 GMT every day, despite repeated appeals to stop) When I step down from being El Presidente in like 2017 or something I know OSM is going to be safe in these guys hands.

Oh yeah. Ed. You remember that completeness stuff you were talking about? Siooma, baby. Siooma. (Thanks to b3ta.)

Safety in numbers

2008-01-22T07:33:00.000-08:00

My fantastic company ZXV is doing a Week of OpenStreetMap at the moment. It's like a Google Summer of Code but shorter, not sunny and we don't have the beanbags. Or the money.

So one of our aims is to fix the bits in OSM where only one person knows how it works. We're moving stuff from obscure languages like MUMPS which has been around for 40 years, to Rails which has been around for like three-and-a-half so is totally more future-proofed. Our guys do tend to have accidents and Ed has been muttering sinisterly about "be an awful shame if something were to happen to your developers" so we need to take care.

Anyway it got me thinking about other points of failure. Now again the big G has this sorted, they're run by three people who never travel on the same plane, and even Ed's blog is written by two people.

I figure I should apply the same technique to my own blog and hey, it's all crowd-sourcing too. So if you want to be part of the geospatial industry's foremost fake blog, leave a comment and I'll get back to you. Safe.

Ed Parsons, original gangster

2008-01-14T02:49:00.000-08:00

SO this weekend Real Ed gets all paleo on my ass and instantly blows all his neo cred in one blog posting.

See here. Now if you're going to criticise OSM you can do it for many things but "completeness" and "accuracy" are such old-school arguments they could only really come from someone who's still at heart an Ordnance Survey guy. I mean we demolished the completeness argument years ago when I got our stats guy Andy to whip up this graph:

and if anyone tries to argue further I just say "Isle of Man" very quietly and that usually shuts them up.

Anyway I posted a friendly reply from El Coasto, complete with smiley, and Ed gets even more snippy and starts threatening that we're going to "lose credibility". So then I had to unleash da hounds and the whole OSM crowd piles in. Right now I've called a temporary ceasefire but I'm warning you, Parsons, any more shit like this and I'm going to let crschmidt loose on your comments section.

Truth is Ed doesn't quite get Web 2.0 yet. If I were being harsh I'd say he's still a 1.0 kind of guy but this is Google we're talking about, so let's just call him Web 2.0 beta.

Meanwhile, while Ed is busy not mapping the Isle of Man, our guys yesterday - just one day - did world's first Welsh-language webmap and the world's first cycling satnav, neither of which I see Google doing any time soon. Now I don't really understand this Garmin shit but I see the file in question is called GMapsUpp. GMapsUpYours more like.

Anyway must rush. Ed's basically being cocky because his maps are guaranteed a namecheck at MWSF today and ours aren't, so I figured I might take a leaf out of Gizmodo's book. You know, Ed, (other) Steve's going to be totally not happy when he finds out your intemperate blog posting fscked up his keynote. Have fun.

Sorry

2008-01-05T15:01:00.000-08:00

Haven't posted much over Christmas, I've been busy travelling the world and setting up companies and well, you know how it is. If you want to catch up with my fake frequent flyer points you can do so with the DOPPLR! stuff in the sidebar.

Anyway you all loved my Tard Army post, so I've reworked it for the Geowanking list. I had to simplify it a bit because the wankers aren't as smart as the OSM crowd - there are just three types of tards in this version. But you'll recognise the theme, and I'm proud of the "you won’t need money" reference which is pure Stallman. If you missed the VGI workshop don't worry - I'll be reprising it for the SOTM keynote speech.

Incidentally, SteveJ was at one of the break-out sessions at the VGI do and, well, I'm not actually allowed to tell you what's going to be in the MWSF keynote, but you should definitely search Localizable.strings in your jailbreak iPhone for the string OpenStreetMap. I'm just saying, is all.

Tard army

2007-12-11T13:59:00.001-08:00

Hey.

So there's been this debate out there in blogland about "neogeography vs paleogeography". Fake Ed, for example, has called some of the new arrivals "neotard frigwit hackers".

I think I can speak for the entire community when I say I deplore his use of the offensive word f---wit to decry those with a different view to his. As everyone knows, liberal use of the word f---wit in a geo context is my trademark and I'll fight to the death to keep it.

Anyway. The problem with this kind of argument is that it oversimplifies everything into two polarised groups. This is hardly fair nor conducive to informed debate.

In fact there are not just two, but many types of tards.

ARC/Tards. Hold a mysterious religious belief that any fields called 'lat' and 'long' in a database require a $500,000 piece of software to manage. After 30 years of laughing at traditional cartography as old-fashioned, ARC/Tards are now shocked to be the objects of derision themselves, and are secretly hoping that if they ignore this Internet thing, it might go away. Things not to say to an ARC/Tard: "Sorry, you say that's just the annual licence fee?", "Yeah, you can do the same with a CPAN module and two lines of Perl", "How long does it take to learn this stuff?"
WFS-Tards. WFS-Tards have the conservatism of ARC/Tards and the cluelessness of neotards, surely a winning combination. In WFS-Tardland, also known as OSGeo, the way to solve a problem is to invent a new standard. No free mapping data? Let's design an open shapefile format because hey, some might turn up. Things not to say to a WFS-Tard: "Yes but what does it do?", "And that's faster than using Google tiles?", "So... who else is using this?"
Neotards. Your canonical neotard is a Google API junkie who instantly forgets the difference between 'free beer' and 'free speech' upon taking the first hit from the API crack pipe. Neotards build sites with an 'r' at the end which are ALL THE FRIGGING SAME, except DOPPLR! which is the same but with more lols. Things not to say to a Neotard: "So the lawyers have ok'd your CC license then?", "Of course, it won't quite look like that when Google puts ads on the map", "Ok... and the business model?"
Googletards. In the contest for which crazy Google labs project can piss away the Adwords money quickest, Google Maps is way, way out in front. Every drag on a Google Map means one less canape at Larry's wedding. Zoom in and they have to sell a beanbag. Things not to say to a Googletard: "You know, in Europe, we have footpaths", "How much is this costing you again?"

(For the sake of my comments section I'm not including the People's Map in today's list of tards.)

What the neotards and the paleotards have in common is that the world would not change if they disappeared overnight. Maybe some surveyors would have to learn how to use a calculator and a Rotring pen again, I dunno.

The ARC/Tards aren't going to disappear any time soon, but the neotards might. You think TomTom are going to let people keep deriving from TeleAtlas data the way they're doing at the moment, without wanting a slice of the action themselves? Right, and monkeys will fly out of my butt. Note also how Google is now encouraging all the neotards to plot their mashups on Google itself (it's called 'My Maps'), supposedly to empower you to mash up two sources together, but really so that Google, not you, ownz0rs all the rich data.

OpenStreetMap is the exception because we're actually creating stuff. If we disappeared overnight then there'd be no free data, and guys like the Cambridge cycle dudes would have to stop making their maps. Also, even if we do occasionally have some tards in the OSM community, Fake Steve's First Law of Crowd-Sourcing says that as you get more guys together, the sum total of cluelessness decreases.

So, when Bubble 2.0 bursts, it's auf wiedersehen Plazes and Platial - but vorsprung durch technik OSM.

Incidentally, there is one bunch of neotard frigwit hackers that I will give house room, and that's those crazy guys at DOPPLR!. I've put a DOPPLR! panel on my sidebar now so you can follow Fake Steve around the world. Much love to Don DOPPLR! Jr for his awesome frigwit creation. Have fun.

Basingstoke

2007-12-10T09:04:00.000-08:00

Great party. Ok so we actually had to get our mobiles out and set up a conference call just to hear each other, the pub was that noisy, but - hey - that's the power of the crowd. Anyway there's another opportunity for Fake Steve fanlove next week if you missed me.

Much love to Dr Strangelove for having the cojones to comment on my People's Glorious Five-Year Map post. It's kind of glamorous that you have a guy from Basingstoke, although how he gets to work I don't know because you don't really have any roads there (compare). To be fair though, your guys do appear to have the difference between green and red roads sussed, which is something our lot always have trouble with. You should tell us how you did it.

The People's Map is deeply fucked

2007-12-06T08:41:00.000-08:00

Hey. Today I want to talk to you about The People's Map.

The People's Map is this effort by some cartographer guys with beards to do OpenStreetMap, except without the fun bit (parties). Also, they don't have any Germans and take it from me, not having Germans is a serious blow to any collaborative mapping website. Also, the guys with beards actually make less sense than the Germans even though they're speaking English.

They do have this really great imagery, the whole site is owned by an imagery company. Selling aerial imagery was a good idea for about two months in 1999. Now everybody has downloaded Google Earth for free (which our friend Ed invented) so good luck with that.

So these guys have created the People's Map and it's taken them about three years and they now have five roads and an editor that doesn't work properly. Meanwhile we've mapped half of Britain and the entire Netherlands.

Anyway, it's a little known fact that Nick and I actually worked on the People's Map back in the day. Unfortunately, code you can buy but clue has to be earned (or crowdsourced). If there's one thing that's been contentious in OSM and they might be able to improve upon with hindsight, it's the license - but look at theirs:

You may copy the People's Map except when you may not.
All copyright is retained by the People's Map where prohibited by applicable laws and/or your mum.
Exceptions may be granted for non-profit organisations in the area bounded by Ordnance Survey grid square SK23 on a Thursday, if you pay us.
Reproduction is not permitted at scale 1:100,000 or above. What is this pixel shit anyway? I want a paper map.

That's not only unfree, it's barely English.

What we figured and they haven't is: it's the community, stupid. You're not going to get hundreds of mappers pounding the streets of Reigate just so that some guy can afford to buy himself platinum-plated beard-clippers. But when you contribute to OpenStreetMap you get a warm glow of satisfaction, especially if you stand near the t@h server, which is currently heating the eastern seaboard of the US because some German dude has decided to request the entire Norwegian coastline at pebble-level detail or something.

Siooma, motherfuckers. Siooma.

Medway mapping party

2007-12-05T09:21:00.001-08:00

For those crazy dudes who can't get enough OSM, we've got a mapping party in medway this weekend after the Christmas party.

I've been unilateralist and nominated a venue for the morning, in Rochester. Hope to see lots of people there - I mis-spent much of my youth in Walderslade, so it will be great to go back and see where the school hall burnt down and so on.

Edit:

Could I clarify that the school hall was nothing to do with me and they were someone else's matches anyway. Ok so I am torching the business model of the entire geodata industry as we speak but that's coincidence.

Could I also clarify that I in no ways stand to benefit if an accident happens to the Ordnance Survey's current headquarters and all their outdated paleotard equipment shortly after they vacate it for a new one. Ed might want to comment about whether he's still a signatory on the insurance policy though.

Cartographers

2007-12-05T02:00:00.000-08:00

Hey. Awesome to be back with you guys, we're all stoked here at ZXV towers about the party on Friday. I've got my OSM party outfit (jeans and T-shirt) and Nick's doing the MC role again. People are coming from far-out places like Sheffield and some place that begins with N so you have to be there.

I know my adoring public are hanging on their RSS feeds for the latest from El Coasto. So I want to keep sharing some of the latest open goodness with you. But on the other hand I don't want to post too often and seem needy like... well, you know, some guys who just read some shit on a geo site and get all snippy because they spotted it first.

So here's some shit I spotted on a geek site instead. Sometimes in OpenStreetMap the cartographers get a bit stressy about the license, they say they can't make their maps with our data and I'm like, well, that's totally not my problem, you guys have to adapt and make your money from something else, and hey, maybe you could shave some of those beards off while you're there.

So this post on Slashdot sums up exactly what I feel. It's actually in a thread about PNDs directing truckers through some little village near some place that begins with N or something. But I think our cartographer friends can learn from it.

Barrow Gurney, instead of trying to do away with this new source of traffic, adapt! Enjoy the opportunity of having all these truck drivers going through your locality to develop your economy and move on to the next level!

Everyone knows a truck driver craves fornication with women. Have whores! Put some money into turning an old farm in dereliction into a brothel and import truckloads of east European prostitutes! Then build your economy around this, build hotels, fast-food restaurants, gynaecology clinics, and soon enough you'll be the city every European truck driver wants to stop in!

Awesome.

By the way. Did you guys notice Dr Tim Strangelove from People's Map on the comments? Now, Tim and I have our differences and I've got some stuff to share with you about People's Map soon. But at least he posted and you don't get that from the ESRI guys. Peace out. Have fun.

Party

2007-12-04T05:36:00.000-08:00

So you should totally come to our OpenStreetMap Christmas party on Friday. OSM people really know how to party and you can guarantee that there'll be at least five people discussing the highway tag and three people taking a GPS apart. Sometimes we have provocative T-shirts saying "I master my own map" or "Google Maps can suck my highway=private", and I'm hoping for a bit of Fake SteveC fanlove there too. (Not in the biblical sense.)

It'll be totally wild. Everyone welcome. Except unfree-tards.

Okay

2007-12-03T09:26:00.000-08:00

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.