June 24, 2003

P2P mapping

Serendipity today. I spent a frustrating 20 minutes looking for a good online map of the Med. I found lots of fucking people that wanted to sell me a map - but none simply available online.

I guess Cartography is not a very open industry - and rightly so as it has always been very expensive to do the research to create good maps.

But in conversation with Tim O'Reilly when he was arguing that it is funny that the Mapquest type apps don't draw on their user community.

The answer is obvious - P2P maps made available by users covering their particular area - using cameras, GPS and P2P databases to deliver the apps.

I should cross post this to Shouldexist.org ... Posted by james at June 24, 2003 10:48 AM | TrackBack