I’m not sure where you folks are located, but I’m in the U.S., and OSM in my area needs quite a bit of updating, and really needs to have its profile raised. I actually contract with Google, and the more I have worked with them and their map-related products, the more convinced I become that while Google has a great deal of brand recognition, they don’t have the love for cartography and the people who benefit from it like OSM people do.

I’ve become a huge fan of OSM, and I now spend my efforts refining it rather than adding trails to my favorite places on Google Mapmaker. In the future I hope to bring even more useful contact and plug it into OSM as a great value add to consumers and local businesses alike. I’m glad OSM has been so successful abroad, and I hope that one day everyone here in the US will come around to it as well! I think that explaining that OSM is the free, open source alternative to Google Maps is a perfect way of explaining yourself here in the U.S. The SEO benefits are well worth it for the business owner, and one that I may begin doing as part of my whole effort to help businesses deal with the plethora of business listings out there.