Reuse and Prosper

So my cycle map here on Gravitystorm isn't likely to become the world's one stop cycle website any time soon. I don't have the time, and I certainly don't have the skills, to add all the bells and whistles to attract megathousands of pagehits per day. So what's the long term strategy?

Who knows? Not me anyway! For now, I'm going to continue to work on the cycle tiles, making them look better, showing more useful things that cyclists might be interested in - eagle-eyed observers would have noticed one of the first changes I made was to show pubs at many more zoom levels! There's plenty of things in the pipeline in this area.

One of the main beneficiaries of the cycle map is the OpenStreetMap project itself, since it acts as a great demonstration as to the possibilities of specialist cartography - something that's just not possible with layering more and more objects over the top of a google map. But the best way for cyclists to benefit is for their own, specialist websites to swap google for OSM. The first two websites to reuse my tiles are Bonius.com, and the excellent Camden Cycle Campaign website, where the OSM cycle tiles are an optional backdrop. Hopefully the coverage of the cycle data in central and north London will rapidly expand - if we can do that, I think we can persuade the CCC to use our OSM tiles as the default layer!

So if any of you reading this know of other websites that could benefit from better cycle maps, then let me know. I can already think of one mountain biking route map (like the link, Gary?) that would be ten times better if it could show nearby pubs!

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This post was posted on 1 December 2007 and tagged OpenStreetMap