Most of you have probably generated bike routes on Ride the City. But how many have contributed to the Ride the City basemap? The background image at Ride the City is provided by Cloudmade, a company that's all about services and applications that are based on Open Street Map (OSM), the volunteer effort to map the world. Open Street Map provides the data, Cloudmade makes services that help to get that data to the end user. With Cloudmade's Style Editor, developers can customize their own map style or copy other maps. Here are some of the map styles from the Style Editor:

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.