I was recently directed to an article online which looked at the impact of the growing use of online mapping services such as Google Maps, on the way we understand and interact with the landscape around us. The debate centred around statements made at a conference of the Institute of British Geographers in London earlier this year where Mrs Mary Spence, President of the British Cartographic Society, accused online mapping of "demolishing thousands of years of history" by failing to include historical landmarks such as "churches, ancient woodlands and stately homes". Thus she argues "We're in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique, giving us a feel for a place even if we've never been there."

However, rather than losing our sense of our surroundings and place, I would argue online mapping enables us to move away from a top-down model of supposedly 'correct' cartography. Instead we can explore and interact with new ways of understanding, sharing, storing, displaying and building geographical data. Mapping services such as Google Maps enable us to manipulate the data stored within their archives to create personalised maps showing us whatever we want to see. Whether we're searching for post boxes, restaurants, strip clubs or indeed the previously quoted, much-sought-after, ancient woodland.

Projects such as the fantastic OpenStreetMap allow anyone to submit data and annotations into a searchable geographic database with a creative commons license - a big contrast to the restrictive licensing and costs around providers like the Ordnance Survey. Of course I'm not ignoring the guaranteed quality inherent to mapping created by authoritative cartographic institutions like the Ordnance Survey and their years upon years of painstaking collection of information. What they produce, based upon their criteria, is a wonderful resource used by many thousands of people every day. But it is founded on a world and ways of working from over a thousand years ago. In those days there was one map – one way to see the world – one vision of your surroundings according to the cartographer. With mass participation we can add more and more layers onto the mapping "onion". Not only the accurate accumulated historical knowledge available but also a dynamic set of real-time content – from pictures to the weather to local stores to events as they happen.

Why not take the best of the traditional methods and the best of newer technologies and embrace the brilliant resulting mash-up? I believe there are more open, engaging and flexible ways to work. So now is the time to call for such institutions as the Ordnance Survey to make their data more accessible and flexibly licensed so their information can enrich newer more open, crowd-sourced interfaces.

Along with its everyday route planning and tourism functions, online mapping has completely opened up opportunities to develop mapping. It can be a dynamic medium where we record our shared or individual experiences and personal knowledge. Though public collaboration we're charting an exciting and original record of the world, seen through the eyes of its diverse inhabitants.

HomeMade Digital has recently completed a project with the teams at Moblog and Shozu to build 'Britglyph' - a collaborative public art project aiming to map the world's largest geoglyph : stretching the length and breadth of Great Britain from Aberdeen down to the South coast. Using geo-location mobile technology, powered by Shozu, 'Britglyph' asks participants to travel to certain points across the UK (with the help of directions from a new Flash interface based on Google Maps) to deposit a rock or pebble. Participants then take a photo of themselves and their rock and upload it to the 'Britglyph' website. As more and more people contribute their photos a new kind of geoglyph will be projected onto the map of Great Britain: its design inspired by John Harrison's Chronometer.

The project builds on the success of a similar endeavour undertaken by the HomeMade Digital team and Alfie Dennen , founder of Moblog, to raise awareness of "extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis" (XDRTB)as part of the campaign launched by the TED prize winning, acclaimed photojournalist James Nachtwey in 2007. The project supported the campaign by using Nachtwey's photographs as hidden objects across London, which when their locations were collated, photographed and uploaded to the website marked out the XDRTB logo over London.

Both of these projects give an exciting insight into the ability of online mapping to enable new forms of creative collaboration: bringing together disparate groups of people via their phones and the web to facilitate new and exciting ways of seeing the world.

Some final thoughts. While the quality and depth of the output from traditional cartographic institutions such as the Ordnance Survey is, in some regards, yet to be exceeded through online portals, it may soon be. The invention and subsequent explosion of online mapping technology is gaining ground despite its relative infancy. Far from being a disengagement from maps (who could fold one in gale-force 8 winds on the side of a mountain anyway?) and the landscape we live in it is re-energising our collective connection to our heritage and surroundings. It should be seen as both an opportunity for wider collaboration in the production of geographical data and an avenue for sharing greater insight about the spaces we explore every day.