We love GoogleMaps, but one of the problems with it is that you can't really add your own data to it. Sure, you can superimpose your imagery on a GoogleMaps layer, but it won't show unless people use a special URL. That's the reason for the creation of OpenAerialMap.
Pict'Earth's Jeff Johnson explains:
"OAM gives us a place to publish the imagery so that it easily reused. Basically the imagery that Google and MS Aggregate is not truly 'free' in the sense that it cannot be used in any useful sense outside of their programs without an overbearing license. Its kind of like Navteq or Teleatlas data. It may be freely available, but its not really free. So then, the goal of OAM is to provide a place where people like us (doing DIY stuff) can publish our imagery in a central place, but also a place for governments and other organizations that pay for imagery to get help publishing their data into the public space in an open/free way."
O'Reilly's Brady Forrest has great post that explans more here. (He also mentioned that I'm going to be giving a DIYDrones presentation at ETech on March 3-4 in San Diego. More on that later.)
You can see one example of one pass I took of the Alameda Naval Air Station runway that was orthrectified and stitched by Pict'Earth and is now part of the standard OAM map at that lat-lon (our imagery circled in the screen shot above).
(credits: Christopher Schmidt set up OpenAerialMap and the servers are hosted by Telascience, SDSC and bandwidth comes from CalIT)
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