BlinkGeo

1stJuly

Making the Ultimate Map?

In an odd and serendipitous way, I managed to stumble across this article by Newsweek titled “Making the Ultimate Map: When Digital Geography Teams Up with Wireless Technology and the Web, the World Takes on Some New Dimensions.” It showed up on this one RSS feed. It’s dated June 7, 2004.

This article is a great little find that gives some great perspective on just how quickly the geospatial industry has changed. Some nice little nuggets:

There’s no mention of Google Maps (as Google Maps wasn’t released until a full year later).
Microsoft’s flagship product is still called Map Point and its ‘Map Point Division’ is comprised of 150 engineers
Google Earth…was not yet Google Earth. It was KeyHole (and it wasn’t free).
There’s mention of GeoURL as a way to tag location information for ‘Weblogs’. Whatever happened?
Jack Dangermond (ESRI) gets two big paragraphs as he discusses the ‘The Virtual Globe’

The last paragraph is not too far off target either:

Ideally, they’ll all coexist: think of these supermaps as the equivalent of Web browsers yielding the world’s knowledge through the lens of location. They’ll spur companies and governments to make better-informed decisions and enrich the experience of just plain people as they take a walk through the city, hook up with their friends and hunt for Chinese food. These will be maps that change the territory.

Umm, a different kind of Supermap…

Super Map

Stay up to date by subscribing to my RSS feed

Trackback

No comments

23rdJune

Google Releases Map Maker - What about OpenStreetMap?

By Andres | In News

Google has officially released Map Maker [via Google Lat Long], a collaborative set of tools that allow users to contribute data for use in countries/regions where Google Maps does not have very good data/coverage. This is taking the concept of crowd-sourcing even more mainstream than the Big G’s efforts in India.

At present, the list of countries where Map Maker can be used is relatively small, but there is the potential for widespread adoption of Map Maker for many more countries where there is limited or ‘bad quality’ geospatial data available.

Some lingering questions remain.

How will Map Maker affect the OpenStreetMap project?

Will Google play nice and make the crowd-sourced data available for use in applications other than Google Maps and in some common format (hint hint, KML)? Who ultimately should own the data?

Given Microsoft’s recent announcement of GoVE, is raster data (e.g., aerial photographs) the next target for user-contributed content for Google Maps?

Stay up to date by subscribing to my RSS feed

Trackback

Comments: 3

21stJune

Twitter…Three Months Later

By Andres | In Say Wut?

So it’s officially been three months since I joined the twittersphere and began to engage in what I hoped would be a ‘micro-platform’ for collaboration and information exchange.

I figured it might be good to post some of my thoughts and observations about Twitter, and whether indeed it has served as a valuable tool. So here goes…

I am using Twhirl as my default client for following and tweeting.

Overall, Twitter has proved to be a mixed bag. At present I am following 45 people (this number is a moving target as I add and cull users depending on whether I find following them to be a valuable) and I guesstimate that about 25% of the tweets I receive provide some type of value in the sense of collaboration and information exchange. I have also added several feeds from Summize to my RSS reader–these allow me to see any keyword-relevant tweets from a multitude of users.

The tweets that I find most valuable are those in which someone either a) shares a URL to something worth checking out (e.g., geospatial news, a blog post, practical content, or videos that clearly show why John McCain is a complete dumbass), b) asks a technical or theoretical question that engages others, c) provides a collaborative discourse, or d) ‘re-tweets’ a valuable tweet by someone that I may not be following.

Unfortunately, there are other tweets that are not as valuable (read: inane) (though these tweets may be of value to their authors). These are the tweets that point to non-relevant information that has little if any utility. I don’t need to know what someone is doing after hours, what someone is eating, and/or what game they are playing on a Wii. Having said that, I will be the first to admit that I am guilty of such tweets, though for the most part I have attempted to limit these types of tweets, especially in the last month or so. It’s a hard habit to fight, but I hope to steer clear of inane tweets moving forward. My sincere apologies to my followers for any tweets that you may have found to be of questionable value.

I took a week off from Twitter a while back, to see if I would miss it, and I ended up getting back to it, though with some reservation and with the objective of limiting my non-valuable tweets as much as possible. So…is Twitter of value to geo* folks? I think, in part, it is. It’s a relatively good way to push/pull *some* relevant information. The Summize feeds provide some additional coverage that is more targeted. It would be nice to have a higher volume of geo* folks using it, with a focus on collaboration and information sharing. More users, more links/questions/discourse, and less noise would be ideal.

Your constructive feedback, as always, is appreciated.

Stay up to date by subscribing to my RSS feed

Trackback

Comments: 2

19thJune

State Governments + Twitter

By Andres | In Toolbox

Here’s an interesting use of Twitter by the State of Utah:

http://twitter.com/UtahGov/statuses/838685656

Unfortunately, the link in the ‘tweet’ was cut off (and the word geospatial is misspelled), but I think this is a pretty cool use of Twitter by a state government. A good example of a government using an additional gateway for dissemination of updates and other relevant news to some of its constituents.

Found via Summize ‘GIS’ search RSS feed.

Stay up to date by subscribing to my RSS feed

Trackback

No comments

15thJune