During the summer we blogged about the nice maps by Cloudmade that make up the background for Ride the City (here's that blog post). Since then, Cloudmade has developed a great new mapping tool to make for easier mapping. It's called Mapzen: a tool by Cloudmade that helps anyone contribute to the free & volunteer effort to map the whole planet, including your street and favorite places. To access Mapzen, you need an Open Street Map user account, then simply log on and edit the map. Here's a screen shot from Hunts Point, Bronx, where I used to work. Mapzen gives you an aerial photo backdrop, thanks to Yahoo, and then shows image references to help you identify the lines, shapes, or points that you want to map. In this example you can see some of the line options at the top, various types of roads.

From Cloudmade's blog you can read more about what Mapzen has to offer, including lots of new icons for various features, new landuse types, and new places of interest (POIs), like for drinking water and recycling stations.

They also have an iPhone app to help you map on the go. It's called the Mapzen POI Collector. We haven't tried it so don't think of this as an endorsement.

So go ahead and map your neighborhood - include your on- and off-street bike routes - and you'll contribute to the volunteer effort to map the world. It's fun and now it's a bit easier. To learn more about Open Street Map, go to http://www.openstreetmap.org.