Category Archives: Uncategorized

Google Nukes Wikipedia from Orbit

See coverage of knol here and here. It’s incredible they can’t even bring themselves to mention wikipedia in their own announcement. To be fair wikipedia has stagnated in that the mediawiki software hasn’t changed much in years, and the anti-advertising stance is pretty short sighted and just leads to big ‘save wikipedia, donate!’ banners every 3 weeks. But. Still. Why kill the puppy?

This is the real jumping the shark moment for that do no evil commandment. I wonder what freebase will do.

Update: Ok so it’s more competition, but Google engages with Firefox to the point of basically running it. So, why not contribute to either the wikimedia foundation or add features to mediawiki? And ok if they tried that and it didn’t work out… but there’s been no meniton of that.

OSMs first edit war

Live in a disputed area like the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus? How should you name your streets when major governments near you disagree on things like whether they exist?

Such is the dilemma facing David Janda on the talk mailing list:

I am one of two people who are making an effort to map northern Cyprus. For those who do not know, Cyprus is a divided island since 1974. There is the Republic of Cyprus which is internationally recognised in the south, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in the north, which is not. For a backgrounder do a timeline in Google.

The issue I have is regarding names of places.

Since 1974 places were renamed, and as an example, the village where I live, and where I have started the project is called Ozanköy (Turkish). Prior to 1974 it was called Kazaphani (Greek). Now, all signs for the past three decades have been in Turkish, and as OSM is used as a navigational aid I have used the Turkish names and Greek as a secondary where applicable. Example:

name=Ozanköy
old_name=Kazaphani

However, after a few days of editing I noticed that one user using Potlatch changed the tag to:

name=Kazaphani

This has been going on for the past week, and it is taking up my time to correct them.

So, what to do? Is there some adjudication procedure with OSM?

A new advertising model for OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is now featuring adverts from a new location based advertising service, Mappam. Just like the old banner ads that OSM used to carry, the location based adverts will go away once you have logged in. Unlike the old ads, Mappam ads take up very little space – there is only one advert on the map at a time, and it only takes up 16×16 pixels. This means more space for the map and more relevant adverts for OSM users.

Just like with the old ads, all the revenue from advertising goes straight the OSMF Treasurer and for a trial period the advertising broker is not taking any of the advertising revenue.

Ed Parsons (Geospatial Technologist EMEA, Google) to keynote at SOTM07

The OpenStreetMap Foundation are pleased to announce that Ed Parsons will be delivering the Keynote presentation at the State of the Map 2007, on Sunday 15th July 2007. Ed is a well known and respected figure in the geospatial community, whose long-term interest in OpenStreetMap is know to many. In his new position as Google’s Geospatial Technologist for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Ed is in a unique position to talk about OpenGeoData. His talk is titled “The Cathedral and the GPS – a personal view” and promises to be a highlight of the action packed SOTM07 weekend.

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