The New York Times has a nice article on maps and amateur map makers. The specter of 'citizen journalist' was brought in, but that was easy enough to brush aside.
One point of disagreement I had with the Times article is that we aren't becoming mapmakers. What we are doing, except for those participating in GPS tracing, is map annotating, and I do think that's the interesting part of the story. The only thing needed to bring together this messy new world Atlas, is a global agreement about the structure of the data used to annotate the maps, as well as agreement on the format for retrieving such.
Google provides Keyhole Markup Language (KLM), and the Open Geospatial Consortium provides Geography Markup Language (GML), which actually requires a EULA before you can even read the spec. I also read about a geoRSS, but I'm waiting for geoAtom.
Correction
geoRSS is also geoAtom and geoRDF, but going by the generic 'RSS' label. I guess Sam was right, and RSS is the new Kleenex.
In addition to conferences related to Blogher, Ajax, and OSCON (is this official Summer Conference Week, or something?), there was also a conference on the "Geoweb", held in Vancouver. From that I found an accompanying weblog that most recently discusses a RESTful interface to Geospatial information, and points to a Google Group's discussion on same. People in comments mention "the book" so I'm assuming it's Sam Ruby and Leonard Richardson's, RESTful Web Services.
I'm going to get all Creative Commonsly on you and state that we focus so much on art, music, and creative writing when it comes to the 'be free' movement, when I think we should spend more time on data, specifically metadata. I'm a believer that any service that collects metadata from the public, should make such metadata freely available. I won't use a service that doesn't.
From what I can see, most mapping services do provide this. All but Microsoft. Based on searches, there is no metadata export feature for Microsoft's community-derived map collection.
It's really the metadata that makes the geoweb exciting, and the idea of somehow bringing all those annotations together. There's even chit-chat about GML, RDF, and mutual roots.
Frankly, this is the type of stuff that puts a foolish grin on my face.
(PS, I can recommend the O'Reilly book, Mapping Hacks. I'm using it to figure out how to get the most out of my Garmin eTrex Vista Cx.)
