One of the reasons Google gained market share on Yahoo! so quickly was because Google's user interface was clean, uncluttered and unambiguous. It did one thing and it did it well in a simple, intuitive way. OSM's home page should strive for the same thing.

Here's a quick-and-dirty mockup:

http://www.mgnewman.com/sz/osm_mockup.jpg

Thanks to all for the constructive comments.

Collaborative community projects which depend on armies of volunteers can only succeed if the information they gather is accessible to the masses in a way that inspires even more volunteers. Think of Wikipedia. It has been wildly successful because anyone with a web browser can use it. The interface is clean and intuitive. It's all right there. But, how successful would it be if each search only retuned a summary of the article and to get the entire article each user had to compile and run a rendering engine on their own machine?

Look, I'm a 60 year old fixed-income retired geezer living in rural Thailand. The chances of me being able to compile and run Mapnik on my little Mac Mini are zilch. And, even if I were successful in rendering tiles for my part of the world, I'm not going to be able to serve them up to all comers.

I started working on this project with high hopes. Those hopes have mostly been dashed. I'll probably continue, but not with the enthusiasm and vigor that I had in the beginning. The rewards, in terms of contributing to the public good, are just insufficient. That said, I've learned a lot. Always a good thing when you're in your declining years.

"Feel free to generate your own map showing POIs at other zoom levels using the data."

Certainly, if I could, I would. I don't have the slightest idea how to go about such a thing.

And, believe me, with an arrogant attitude like that you're just going to chase people away from this project, not attract them.

For example:

A friend and I worked hard to map this area of Thailand:

osm.org/go/4ZA9uwr-

It's an ampoer (county) in Nakhon Ratchasima province. It's adjacent to Thap Lan National Park and contains dozens of funky little resorts and restaurants. We decided it would be a decent public service to map the area and mark POIs for all the struggling little businesses in there.

After mapping the roads and starting to locate various POIs we realized that our effort probably wasn't worth it. In order for the map to be useful you need to view it at the zoom level in the URL above, so that you can see that national park and the main highway. But, in order to see any of the POIs you have to zoom in so far that you have no idea where you are in relation to known landmarks.

Bottom line: my friend decided not to bother any more. Result: we've lost the only data gatherer we had in that part of Thailand.

Why not render each tile based on the number of objects present? That way you can render each tile just once using a density-appropriate style sheet.

I wish I understood why it was so complex. CloudMade allows you to customize style sheets, which seems to show how easy it can be. But, CloudMade customizations do not include displaying POI icons at lower zoom levels. In other words you have to be having a detailed look at the VB cans in the Todd River before you discover there's a pub in town….

It would be very nice if the CloudMade style editor had more flexibility in terms of the visibility of objects at various zoom levels. While it might make sense to limit the visibility of, say, hotels to zoom levels 16 and above in dense urban areas, this restriction is not appropriate in the countryside where accommodation is scarce. I can understand wanting to limit clutter in cities, but outside of cosmopolitan areas showing more POI's makes the map both more interesting and more useful.