On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 7:48 PM, Michal Migurski <m...@stamen.com> wrote: > On Dec 28, 2011, at 2:21 AM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> I should be more specific: this person goes to maps.google.com, they see a > big map with a search box, they enter an address and pan around to look at > their house or hometown. They go to openstreetmap.org, and they see a big map > with a search box so they assume OSM is filling the same need. It's clear > from your mails that you think OSM fills a lower-level, more data-oriented > need so we should *change our public presentation to fit what we're actually > trying to do.* I think we need to keep the "big map with a search box" quite prominently, partly because that is a major use, and partly because that is what will attract newcomers' attention and give them a way to evaluate the quality of our data (reading an XML file in an editor isn't an easy way of seeing whether we cover a particular area well). We should make the availability of the underlying data visible by drawing attention to it *in addition to* the rendered maps, not instead of them --- perhaps a textual link on the front page to the downloads page. For example, we could re-write "OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world." (on the front page) to something like "OpenStreetMap is an editable map of the whole world, freely available both as displayable map and as underlying data." We could add a "Data" link to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm to the list that currently has: Help Centre Documentation Copyright & License Community Blogs Foundation Map Key as it currently takes quite a bit of searching (from a newcomer's knowledge) to find the Planet page on the wiki. >> I'm a little tired of people like that and I hope that by drastically >> reducing the amount of map on our front page we will get rid of them. The problem is, that that might get rid of a lot of other people, too. __John _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
