Everyman Offers New Directions in Online Maps

SAN FRANCISCO — They don’t know it, but people who use Google’s online maps may be getting directions from Richard Hintz.

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Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

From left, John L. Kittle, Mike Nice, David Emory and Annie Godfrey, Mr. Kittle's wife, joined some 200 volunteers in Atlanta last month, braving wind and drizzle to gather map data.

A screenshot of Grant Park in Atlanta before the voluntary mapping effort, organized by OpenStreetMap.com, an open-source digital map.

The map of Grant Park in Atlanta as updated with information the volunteers collected.

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Mr. Hintz, a 62-year-old engineer who lives in Berkeley, Calif., has tweaked the locations of more than 200 business listings and points of interest in cities across the state, sliding an on-screen place marker down the block here, moving another one across the street there. Farther afield, he has mapped parts of Cambodia and Laos, where he likes to go on motorcycle trips.

Mr. Hintz said these acts of geo-volunteerism were motivated in part by self-interest: he wants to know where he’s going. But “it has this added attraction that it helps others,” he said.

Mr. Hintz is a foot soldier in an army of volunteer cartographers who are logging every detail of neighborhoods near and far into online atlases. From Petaluma to Peshawar, these amateurs are arming themselves with GPS devices and easy-to-use software to create digital maps where none were available before, or fixing mistakes and adding information to existing ones.

Like contributors to Wikipedia before them, they are democratizing a field that used to be the exclusive domain of professionals and specialists. And the information they gather is becoming increasingly valuable commercially.

Google, for example, sees maps playing a growing strategic role in its business, especially as people use cellphones to find places to visit, shop and eat. It needs reliable data about the locations of businesses and other destinations.

“The way you get that data is having users precisely locate things,” said John Hanke, a vice president of product management who oversees Google’s mapping efforts.

People have been contributing information to digital maps for some time, building displays of crime statistics or apartment rentals. Now they are creating and editing the underlying maps of streets, highways, rivers and coastlines.

“It is a huge shift,” said Michael F. Goodchild, a professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This is putting mapping where it should be, which is the hands of local people who know an area well.”

That is changing the dynamics of an industry that has been dominated by a handful of digital mapping companies like Tele Atlas and Navteq.

Google is increasingly bypassing those traditional map providers. It has relied on volunteers to create digital maps of 140 countries, including India, Pakistan and the Philippines, that are more complete than many maps created professionally.

Last month Google dropped Tele Atlas data from its United States maps, choosing to rely instead on government data and other sources, including updates from users.

“They have coverage in areas that the big mapping guys don’t have,” said Mike Dobson, a mapping industry consultant who once worked at Rand McNally. “It has the opportunity to cause a lot of disruption in these industries.”

Some people think map data is so valuable that it should be free. OpenStreetMap, a nonprofit group whose mission is to make free maps that can be reused by anyone, has some 180,000 contributors who have mapped many countries in varying levels of detail. The maps are used on a White House Web site that tracks community service opportunities and in many iPhone applications, among other places.

Another collaborative project called WikiMapia is creating its own annotated maps, layered on top of Google’s.

Traditional mapmakers are seeking to adapt by tapping their own citizen cartographers. Tele Atlas, which TomTom bought last year for $4.3 billion, now uses feedback from users of TomTom’s navigation devices to update its maps.

But Tele Atlas says its customers, who might be in delivery trucks or emergency vehicles, can’t rely fully on community-created maps, any more than historians can rely on Wikipedia.

“Most of our customers expect a level of due diligence and quality that is way more than what a community is going to put together,” said Patrick McDevitt, vice president of global engineering at Tele Atlas.

Defenders of the amateur approach point out that professionally created maps often have errors and can be slow to add road closures and other updates. Google has moderators who try to verify the accuracy of users’ changes, unless they are very minor, while OpenStreetMap relies on its members to police changes.

“As far as we can tell so far, these new sources are as accurate as the traditional ones,” Professor Goodchild said.

Contributors to OpenStreetMap have turned the task into a social activity. Last month, a group of some 200 volunteers in Atlanta braved the wind and drizzle to collect map data across the city. Armed with GPS devices, cameras and paper maps of neighborhoods, they added missing alleys, public art, restaurants and hotels.

John L. Kittle Jr., a 55-year-old engineer, was one participant. In the past, Mr. Kittle has corrected street names in Atlanta and improved the map for his home town of Decatur, Ga. Recently an acquaintance mentioned that she lived in a new condo development, and Mr. Kittle added it to the map.

“Seeing an error on a map is the kind of thing that gnaws at me,” he said. “By being able to fix it, I feel like the world is a better place in a very small but measurable way.”

Mr. Kittle said contributing to a project where anyone can freely use the mapping data was important to him. Others, like Mr. Hintz, said they could make a greater contribution through Google, whose maps are widely used.

Some of the most remarkable efforts of amateur map makers are in countries where few, if any, digital maps existed. Google first tested a tool called Map Maker in India, where people immediately began tracing and labeling roads and buildings on top of satellite images provided by Google.

When Google released the tool more broadly last year, Faraz Ahmad, a 26-year-old programmer from Pakistan who lives in Glasgow, took one look at the map of India and decided he did not want to see his homeland out-mapped by its traditional rival. So he began mapping Pakistan in his free time, using information from friends, family and existing maps. Mr. Ahmad is now the top contributor to Map Maker, logging more than 41,000 changes.

Maps are political, of course, and community-edited maps can set off conflicts. When Mr. Ahmad tried to work on the part of Kashmir that is administered by Pakistan, he found that Map Maker wouldn’t allow it. He said his contributions were finally accepted by the Map Maker team, which is led by engineers based in India, but only after a long e-mail exchange.

At his request, Google is now preventing further changes to the region, after people in India tried to make it part of their country, Mr. Ahmad said. “Whenever you have a Pakistani and an Indian doing something together, there is a political discussion or dispute.”

A Google spokeswoman, Elaine Filadelfo, said Google sometimes blocked changes to contentious areas “with an eye to avoiding back-and-forth editing.”

Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Technology (1 of 20) » A version of this article appeared in print on November 17, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.
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Obama Wades Into Internet Censorship in China Address

SHANGHAI — He didn’t explicitly call on China’s leaders to lift the veil of state control that restricts Internet access and online social networking here. But President Obama did tiptoe — ever so lightly — into that controversial topic on Monday when he told students in Shanghai that a free and unfettered Internet is a source of strength, not weakness.

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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

President Obama answered questions during a town hall meeting with future Chinese leaders at the Museum of Science and Technology in Shanghai on Monday.

What Could Obama Do for Your Country?

What Could Obama Do for Your Country?

Readers in the Asian countries President Obama is visiting are invited to share their views via video.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

President Obama fielding questions from students at a town hall meeting in Shanghai on Monday.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

About 500 students were due to be allowed into Monday’s question-and-answer session, and it was expected to be a generally welcoming crowd.

For Mr. Obama, who has been taking pains to strike a conciliatory note during his first visit to China, it was a rare challenge to Chinese authorities, but expressed in Mr. Obama’s now familiar nuance. Responding to a question that came via the Internet during a town hall meeting with Shanghai students — “Should we be able to use Twitter freely?” — Mr. Obama first l started to answer in the slightly off-the-point manner which he often uses when he is gathering his thoughts.

“Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter,” he said. “My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.”

But then he appeared to gather confidence. “I should be honest, as president of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time,” he said. But, he added, “because in the United States, information is free, and I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me, I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”

On a trip where he has gone out of his way to present a kinder and gentler image of America — bowing before Emperor Akihito in Japan (which raised the ire of right-wing bloggers back home), meeting with one of the military rulers of Myanmar, reassuring China that America doesn’t seek to contain the rising economic giant — the Twitter question, and Mr. Obama’s answer, stood out as a stark snapshot of a young American president’s efforts to reach China’s youth while not offending its authorities.

“I will no forget this morning,” one Chinese Twitterer said. “I heard, on my shaky Internet connection, a question about our own freedom which only a foreign leader can discuss.”

Interestingly, China’s government itself demonstrated some restraint, and allowed the Twitter question and Mr. Obama’s answer to stay up on websites hours after the town hall meeting.

That restraint, however, apparently only went so far. The students —some 500 —in the audience seemed handpicked by the government and many were members of the Communist Youth League, which is closely affiliated with President Hu Jintao.

That could explain some of the questions, like this one, offered by a young man who said the question came in from the Internet from a Taiwan businessman worried that some people in America were selling arms and weapons to Taiwan. “I worry that this may make our cross-straits relations suffer,” the questioner said. “So I would like to know if, Mr. President, are you supportive of improved cross-straits relations?”

Mr. Obama grabbed the out that the questioner gave him and ran with it. Making no mention of the part about arms sales to Taiwan, he instead offered up the standard American talking point on Taiwan. “My administration fully supports a one-China policy, as reflected in the three joint communiqués that date back several decades, in terms of our relations with Taiwan as well as our relations with the People’s Republic of China,” he said.

Unlike previous town hall gatherings in China with other American presidents, Mr. Obama’s question-and-answer session was not broadcast live on China’s official state network. Instead, according to the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, live broadcasts inside China were carried on the agency’s Web site and on local Shanghai stations.

The White House streamed the event live on its Web site, , which is not blocked or censored in China, and a simultaneous Chinese translation was offered. The feed also was available through the White House page on Facebook.

Unlike American town hall events, where speakers blast campaign songs while the audience chatters loudly, you could almost hear a pin drop as the students waited for Mr. Obama in an auditorium at the Museum of Science and Technology.

Qian Yu, a student from East China Normal University, said she was impressed with Mr. Obama but not happy about the limited number of questions he took. “I wish it had been a longer time,” she said after. “I had lots of questions I’d have liked to ask.”

Mr. Obama left Shanghai immediately after the town hall meeting, and flew to Beijing where he has a packed schedule: several meetings with China’s leaders, two dinners with Mr. Hu, including an elaborate state dinner Tuesday night, and tours of the Great Wall and the Forbidden City.

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Oxford Word of the Year 2009: Unfriend : OUPblog

Oxford Word of the Year 2009: Unfriend

Filed in A-Editor's Picks , A-Featured , Current Events , Dictionaries , Lexicography , Reference on November 16, 2009 | ShareThis

Birds are singing, the sun is shining and I am joyful first thing in the morning without caffeine. Why you ask? Because it is Word of the Year time (or WOTY as we refer to it around the office).  Every year the New Oxford American Dictionary prepares for the holidays by making its biggest announcement of the year.  This announcement is usually applauded by some and derided by others and the ongoing conversation it sparks is always a lot of fun, so I encourage you to let us know what you think in the comments.

Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: unfriend.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

Wondering what other new words were considered for the New Oxford American Dictionary 2009 Word of the Year?  Check out the list below.

Technology

hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

intexticated – distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

Economy

freemium – a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content

funemployed – taking advantage of one’s newly unemployed status to have fun or pursue other interests

zombie bank – a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support

Politics and Current Affairs

Ardi – (Ardipithecus ramidus) oldest known hominid, discovered in Ethiopia during the 1990s and announced to the public in 2009

birther – a conspiracy theorist who challenges President Obama’s birth certificate

choice mom – a person who chooses to be a single mother

death panel – a theoretical body that determines which patients deserve to live, when care is rationed

teabagger -a person, who protests President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as “Tea Party” protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773)

Environment

brown state – a US state that does not have strict environmental regulations

green state – a US state that has strict environmental regulations

ecotown - a town built and run on eco-friendly principles

Novelty Words

deleb – a dead celebrity

tramp stamp – a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman

Notable Word Clusters for 2009:

Twitter related:
Tweeps
Tweetup
Twitt
Twitterati
Twitterature
Twitterverse/sphere
Retweet
Twibe
Sweeple
Tweepish
Tweetaholic
Twittermob
Twitterhea		 Obamaisms:
Obamanomics
Obamarama
Obamasty
Obamacons
Obamanos
Obamanation
Obamafication
Obamamessiah
Obamamama
Obamaeur
Obamanator
Obamaland
Obamalicious
Obamacles
Obamania
Obamacracy
Obamanon
Obamalypse

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