Monday, January 14, 2008

Ed Parsons, original gangster



SO this weekend Real Ed gets all paleo on my ass and instantly blows all his neo cred in one blog posting.

See here. Now if you're going to criticise OSM you can do it for many things but "completeness" and "accuracy" are such old-school arguments they could only really come from someone who's still at heart an Ordnance Survey guy. I mean we demolished the completeness argument years ago when I got our stats guy Andy to whip up this graph:



and if anyone tries to argue further I just say "Isle of Man" very quietly and that usually shuts them up.

Anyway I posted a friendly reply from El Coasto, complete with smiley, and Ed gets even more snippy and starts threatening that we're going to "lose credibility". So then I had to unleash da hounds and the whole OSM crowd piles in. Right now I've called a temporary ceasefire but I'm warning you, Parsons, any more shit like this and I'm going to let crschmidt loose on your comments section.

Truth is Ed doesn't quite get Web 2.0 yet. If I were being harsh I'd say he's still a 1.0 kind of guy but this is Google we're talking about, so let's just call him Web 2.0 beta.

Meanwhile, while Ed is busy not mapping the Isle of Man, our guys yesterday - just one day - did world's first Welsh-language webmap and the world's first cycling satnav, neither of which I see Google doing any time soon. Now I don't really understand this Garmin shit but I see the file in question is called GMapsUpp. GMapsUpYours more like.

Anyway must rush. Ed's basically being cocky because his maps are guaranteed a namecheck at MWSF today and ours aren't, so I figured I might take a leaf out of Gizmodo's book. You know, Ed, (other) Steve's going to be totally not happy when he finds out your intemperate blog posting fscked up his keynote. Have fun.

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