NomansiteNews / 10 August 2026
The map, and the first thousands
OpenStreetMap knows where studios sit — 18 000 offices with a website tag. It became the seed of the register, and the first lesson in what a seed is worth.
Mapmakers tag an office as graphic design, web design, advertising or IT, and often add its website. That is open data under ODbL, it covers the whole world, and nobody has ever assembled it into a register of studios.
Getting it out was its own exercise: the public query service returns an error on anything heavy, so the world had to be cut into ten longitude bands and asked mirror by mirror. One mirror politely answers «nothing found» for every region except Switzerland — a silent zero that looks exactly like a real one and quietly loses whole countries.
A seed is not a verdict
An office tagged «IT» is not necessarily a studio. So the map does not grant anyone a place in the register: it supplies candidates, and the type arrives later — from a signature in somebody's footer, or from the studio's own homepage read by our crawler. Overrating your own seed is how catalogues fill up with noise.
By the end of the summer the pipeline held tens of thousands of candidate domains, a crawler reading their homepages on a monthly cycle, and the first few hundred studios that had earned their place the hard way.