O’Reilly editor Simon St. Laurent just wrote on O’Reilly’s internal “geo” list: “There’s been some interesting discussion of Google and what it plans to do with Google Maps going forward on the the geowanking mailing list.” He titled his message “Google maps pessimism, optimism.” Here’s the pessimism and here’s the optimism.
If you’ve followed the announcement of O’Reilly’s “Where 2.0 Conference” you already know that location intelligence and mapping are on O’Reilly’s radar. The issues addressed in these two postings — the need for open data if hackers are to be able to innovate in this space, limited by the fact that the underlying data suppliers such as Navteq have a near-monopoly “Intel Inside” position in all the mapping applications, limiting the options for players such as Google — very much need to be on the industry radar as well.
(Note, I’m a big fan of creating more crossover between mailing lists and blogspace. Each has its own vibrant set of conversations, but there aren’t a lot of blog links to mailing list postings, even though most mailing lists have web archives.)