You are a map maker. Yes you are.
Hey guess what! You’re a map maker. Or cartographer. Whatever you want to call it. Yes, I’m serious. The job is yours. Doesn’t pay but it might be fun to do anyway. Microsoft is making you the offer. Now don’t go getting all full of yourself, they’re making the same offer to every person on Earth.
It’s part of the map service on their Bing search engine. I guess they’re looking for a leg up on other map sites. So they’re doing this thing called Bing Open Street Map where you, or anyone, can provide pictures and information and that gets added to the map, to the record of what that place looks like and is.
It was inevitable, really. The Wikipedia model works, lots of people contribute for free, building something bigger. But is bigger better?
We talk about the future of mapping when we’re all map makers. Our guests are Michael Goodchild, professor of geography at the University of California Santa Barbara and Mark Harrower, a map designer at Axis Maps and former professor of cartography at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
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