By Andres | In Say Wut?

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…

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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.

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By Andres | In Say Wut?

Kudos to Andrew Turner for taking a non geospatially enabled data set of Green Buildings in California and quickly converting it to KML for easy geo-consumption and geo-distribution.

(I’m inserting a pause here for all the KML haters to raise their eyebrows/roll their eyes)…. …. …. ….(okay, on with it–and to all the KML-haters: remember, don’t hate the player, hate the game).

Anyway, Andrew’s post prompted me to ask the question: is Google Maps GIS–where do we draw the line?

I think the line is pretty blury, though I myself believe that Google Maps is a basic representation of a GIS.

Your two cents?

P.S.  A quick search on Google and Google Blog Search did not yield much on this question.

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By Andres | In Say Wut?

So…I’m finally getting a chance to catch up on some things and digest a wealth of information from RSS feeds (and tweets). The RSS aggregation site ‘Planet Geospatial’ has culled a number of feeds, and the BlinkGeo blog did not make the cut into the ‘reboot’ version. I never asked for the BlinkGeo feed to be included on the Planet Geospatial site, so there’s really no hard feelings on my end.

RSS aggregation is an interesting concept, and certainly sites like PopURLs and Alltop have proved to be quite popular in the mainstream. PerryGeo has launched Geospatial Reddit, which I think is a great attempt at using a democratic approach to highlight information that is relevant and important for the geospatial community at large–I encourage you to participate (consistently) if you haven’t already. Unfortunately, one of the weaknesses of the Reddit system in general is that there are no RSS feeds (i.e., you cannot subscribe to an RSS feed of Geospatial Reddit).

I tried to use the ‘Geospatial Digg’ approach with BlinkGeo Stories, but ultimately it proved to be less democratic than I hoped–a limited number of folks submitted/voted for stories/posts, and often times people would submit one story (their own post) and move on, without voting (or burying) other stories/posts. I hope Geospatial Reddit has more widespread adoption AND participation, so that the same scenario can be avoided.

As far as RSS aggregation, I think it would be valuable to have more geospatial RSS aggregation sites that are targeted and well balanced. The more the better–I mean it’s just RSS feeds, and you can subscribe/unsubscribe with a single click. One of the main detractors of Planet Geospatial for me is that it is (or was) the only RSS aggregation site for ‘geospatial’ content. A one-stop shop. Pretty binary…

To me it seems weird that there is a perception that putting together an RSS aggregation site is a lot of technical hard work.  Is it?

I actually think the tougher issue at hand is putting together a targeted, well-balanced RSS aggregation site–one that doesn’t include a lot of redundancy and one that does address a niche/specialty. I would love to see geospatial aggregation sites (large and small) that provide variety and diversity, even if there is overlap between them (i.e., one RSS aggregation site has one or more of the same RSS feeds as another site). Perhaps each blog could have its own RSS aggregation page that reflects the author’s interests/tastes…

Will BlinkGeo delve into RSS aggregation? Well, I am currently compiling a list of RSS feeds that I think are valuable, and will likely put together an OPML file(s) to share at the least…though don’t be surprised if some RSS aggregation pages also emerge.

Drop me a line if you would like to have your blog potentially included…but yeah, the democratic approach is getting tossed out the window this time around.

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By Andres | In Say Wut?

Came across this article in the Independent via one of my RSS feeds.  Actually a nice read and certainly some food for thought about place names.

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