[OSM-talk] Using OpenStreetMap on a daily basis

[Lester Caine]

Simon Poole wrote:
> As has been pointed out
> before, the competitive landscape has changed a lot with google becoming
> the near monopolist at least for online mapping services and maybe we
> have to rethink

Cherry picking the quotes ...

Google may be the 'first choice' but they are also in many cases simply the 
worse choice. One of my own use of OSM is to provide location maps for client 
websites. I make sure that they are on google and google+ but in MANY cases when 
you zoom in on google all you get is a white area and no indication of how to 
get to the premises.

At the risk of being acused of advertising ... but in this case google also has 
duff info which we have tried to correct several times over the last year or so!
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.10962&lon=-2.07388&zoom=18&layers=M
https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=ohm%27s+mowers&ll=52.10966,-2.074407&spn=0.001341,0.003707&hq=ohm%27s+mowers&hnear=Broadway,+Worcestershire,+United+Kingdom&t=m&z=19

I then add a 'get directions' button to the contact page and take people to a 
routing engine that actually knows the road a building is on ;)

I'm happy to serve up my own tiles if needs be (the new server has been rending 
the UK since Monday!), but the services available do the job quite nicely at the 
moment.

Education is the key here, and I certainly think that while we NEED a good map 
server, making openstreetmap.org a link to a good getting started page does make 
perfect sense. and add map.openstreetmap.org for the map direct and keep 
wiki.openstreetmap.org as the documentation front page. http://switch2osm.org/ 
is actually a cleaner front end at the moment?

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk