I have always wondered whether there was someone out there who realized the potential of this. I am positively impressed.

I might also suggest WikiMapia (http://www.wikimapia.org), which is (or has evolved into) a more tourism oriented site.

I might shed some light on T4A. We started 8 years ago when GPS maps were absolute terrible – outside the cities most of them still are. We have accumulated more than 7mil km of tracks from people all over the world and our map spans 420 000 km of navigable road.

On the wikipedia based open streets project; yes we are well aware of them. They seem to want to have a ‘free’ map of the world where we want an accurate one. Quality costs money and we have to sell our product to sustain resources etc.

Our ultimate aim though is to make a difference in Africa. For us Conservation = Information and it is best served where people have a necessity to look, i.e. GPS maps, paper maps, Google Earth and other published media.

This goal can only be reached if we have a community of people taking part and that is really where we have our edge.

This is then also the reason for collaborating with Google in order to get our information published as widely as possible.

As far as roads data goes we see that the map is maturing – from a tourist’s perspective at least. Where we now see lots of growth is in the rich content and we hope to add stories and photo’s to all the little dots we publish on Google Earth.

These stories will span all interests and we hope to embed messages that could raise awareness amongst the travelling public that would have a positive effect on Africa – in which ever way and in any degree of importance.

There is no google earth app on top of that yet, but at least something like google maps