Google Crowd-Sources Maps 151
Wamoc writes "Google has invited 'citizen cartographers' to refine the US map for Google Maps and Google Earth. 'Today we're opening the map of the United States in Google Map Maker for you to add your expert local knowledge directly. You know your neighborhood or hometown best, and with Google Map Maker you can ensure the places you care about are richly represented on the map. For example, you can fix the name of your local pizza parlor, or add a description of your favorite book store.'"
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like Google is starting to fear the progress made my open street maps... http://www.openstreetmap.org/ [openstreetmap.org]
Has everyone forgotten CDDB? (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenStreetMaps is a classic grass-roots effort. People have sweat blood making OSM work, proving the "business" model, working out the kinks, and donating immeasurable time towards making this a success. Now that somebody has done the dirty work to prove that this method of crowd-sourcing maps can work, Google trots out its sexy service that will grab the buzz, divert the resources, advertise interest away and steal the user cycles towards improving its own closed proprietary maps. Yes, that's correct, proprietary -- there's no guarantee that what you do will remain freely available.
Has everyone forgotten the CDDB debacle? Quoting wiki [wikipedia.org]: "The original software behind CDDB was released under the GNU General Public License, and many people submitted CD information thinking the service would also remain free." Those of you who remember will recognize what an understatement that is. Needless to say, those users were wrong and one day they found that all their effort was suddenly swallowed up and they were being asked to pay for access to the data they submitted.
I don't believe Google is evil and I don't work with OSM, but if Google is not evil it has to realize the negative impacts its actions can have on the kinds of grassroots open-source efforts it claims to support. Google is not stepping in to use its resources to do what the crowd cannot -- it will end up undercutting a project where the crowd was doing just fine on its own. And the ordinary Joes need to realize what is going on and channel their efforts to the project where they will own the product. OpenStreetMap.
Re:Google is Today's Tom Sawyer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like all of the fun that Gracenote [wikipedia.org] did with the CDDB several years ago. A very much for-profit company who collected a ton of information from volunteers and then turned it into a for-profit business that screwed over the volunteers who couldn't even access the database for their own contributions without paying a licensing fee.
I like Open Street Map, and that was my first thought when I heard that Google was letting volunteer contributions in. Google has in fact been a real pain in the behind to that project and does view it as the "competition".