I know many readers of my blog are very interested in the OpenStreetMap project so this news will all make you breath a sigh of relief. The great visionary Michael Arrington has the hot scoop:

Many people describe CloudMade?s OpenStreetMap project as Wikipedia for maps,? and they aren?t far off. The project allows anyone to add and edit map data around the globe, and the project is now a viable open and free source of mapping data for third party developers.

CloudMade has allowed entire new classes of applications to be possible. In Germany 150,000 people have paid to download skobbler, which is based on data from OpenStreetMap. Countless other apps also use the data. One notably creative one a gay cities app that shows the gay areas of cities around the world, with points of interest.

I’ve been a huge proponent of CloudMade’s OpenStreetMap project since the Cloudmade guys created it back in the day. Thus being a CloudMade OpenStreetMap participant for years, I’m glad to see that the CloudMade project is finally getting its due.

.
.
.
.

Ugh right? The whole “article” sounds like it was planted for CloudMade’s gain because to represent the OpenStreetMap project this way is a huge diservice to those of us who have put countless nights on improving the maps. Toss in one softball comment and we’ve got a hype project working.

Update: In fairness to Cloudmade, they have clearly stated that they are not running the project.

I take two things away from this. Arrington doesn’t understand a thing about location and someone (a VC perhaps) is feeding Arrington bad information. It would appear the management of Cloudmade was unaware of this story so if there is something going on, it is outside of their knowledge.

I’m fairly sure both Steve and Nick wouldn’t represent CM this way so lets just go on the assumption Arrington and some wacko know nothing about anything.