After plowing through copyright agreements for other map services, and after having numerous connection problems to the USGS National Map Viewer, I’ve decided to use OSM maps on my website. I doubt very much that the traffic generated to my site would be enough to be billed by Google or Bing, but considering the former’s attitudes towards privacy, billing, and other issues, I would much rather contribute to an open project such as this.

After viewing map tiles for my area, I can see places which still need to be listed, but it’ll be awhile before I feel advanced enough in my OSM studies to be able to contribute. I downloaded the latest version of JOSM and have been practicing, but I still need improvement.

I guess my biggest fear is that I’ll wreck someone else’s work with my ignorance, or post something that is wrong that I won’t be able to correct.