elmato

I am deffinately a fan of freedom of information. I am not a big fan of having to resort to getting said information from commercial sources. Google are a fantastic company. They have made magnitudes of information available to the masses, whether through the best search engine of our time, or more recently the google maps/earth products. Though as far as local information is concerned, I strongly feel the government should be providing this information for us, NOT a foreign entity. Geoscience Australia surely have the capacity to deliver a google maps alternative. ABC. OUR national broadcaster offers an excellent geotagged news service in cahoots with google earth. Why do they have to use a foreign private companies product? If you look at such projects as wikipedia/openstreetmaps etc, I am bewildered as to why our government doesnt set up an open, free to edit, free to use street map / wiki site. After all, why pay a team of mappers to keep things current when you merely need to employ a handful of moderators to check user added content for correctness? There is no need to develop software as 10 mins of 'googling' will show you there are several fantastic opensource mapping projects already in existence that could be tweaked to your needs. Then extra information can be added by various government agencies. for example, zoom in on your town and check out the latest feed from BOM, or perhaps the latest earthquake information. This is the tip of the iceberg. There is an absolute plethora of information that can be added as various overlays from many government departments, federal AND local.