Google wants you to help create maps

According to a recent speech by Google Earth’s chief technology officer Michael Jones — which Brady Forrest describes at the O’Reilly blog — the site is using “crowdsourcing” techniques to generate detailed maps of India — using a package that the company has put together with a GPS transmitter and some software that it hasn’t publicly released yet. There’s a transcription of the talk and some more details at Dan Karran’s blog, and the Google Earth blog notes that this approach is very similar to the Open Street Map project — except of course that OSM is, well… open. More thoughts at FortiusOne. We all work for Google in one way or another, don’t we? Whether we know it or not 🙂