Wednesday, July 2. 2008

Update: State Licensing Board "Censors" GIS Article

Update 7/2/08: See comment below from PS Editor Tom Gibson for the further details.

---- Original post 6/30/08 -------

Back when I read more print magazines, I always relished the editorials. Wow, I thought, a whole page for the editor to tell you what was on his or her mind. My favorite editorial writers back then where Roopinder Tara at Cadence (who I wrote for at that publication, then worked for at Tenlinks.com) and the then editor of Backpacker, I don't recall his name. Today I still make it a point to read the editorials in print publication in geospatial and related industries.

It's in one of those, Tom Gibson's "editor's desk" (sic) column in Professional Surveyor (July 2008, page 4, not online yet) that I found this statement:

In assembling this issue, we had one company withdraw a feature story because a state licensing board was concerned it depicted GIS practitioners as doing work surveyors should be doing, saying they should be licensed as surveyors to do it.

That prompted a few responses from me:
(1) I wonder how the state licensing board had a chance to read the article.
(2) Does preventing such articles to be published limit instead of encouraging discussion on the matter?
(3) Should Directions Media (and other geopublishers formal and informal) be prepared to deal with this issue? Will we be receiving "take down" notices regarding articles that include descriptions of such work in alleged violation of state laws?

Disclosure: I used to work for the company that publishes Professional Surveyor.

Ask.com Moves to Virtual Earth

Search Engine Land reports that Ask.com has dropped its homegrown mapping app (built on deCarta, if memory serves) and switched to Microsoft Virtual Earth. Story and pics at Virtual Earth, Evangelist blog.

EC OK on Nokia Purchasing NAVTEQ

The deal should close in five days.

- press release

Starbucks Closing Stores; Some too close together

You likely heard the news about a 12,000 person reduction in employees and the closing of some 600 stores. (Seattle Times) Florida and California will be most impacted; they've been hard hit by the economy and credit crisis. Also, "About 200 of those will be directly operated by Starbucks, with the rest managed by other companies like bookstores and airport concession firms."

I try to make sense of the "too close together" aspect of this story from the land of Dunkin Donuts. Here in my city we hold a large 4 mile race on Thanksgiving. The course passes four Dunkin Donuts and that's far from all the ones we have! We have, to my knowledge, just two Starbucks. Dunkin Donuts, either by design or luck, doesn't seem to have the cannibalism problem. I have a hunch about that.

It's my sense that Dunkin Donuts is far more about "take out." The stores here are notoriously near bus stops and many have parking lots of key commuting routes. Besides, when was the last time you spent much time in a Dunkin Donuts? Starbucks, while it does have a good take out business (which is why I find the closing airport Starbucks odd), is about that mythical third place, the one that's not home or work. It's business is centered around "hanging out in a nice place." Dunkin Donuts surely is not (our local stores often have a sign stating how long patrons may stay - typically 20-30 minutes). If that's all true, it seems you'd travel less for a take out coffee/donut, than for a "sit and enjoy" environment of Starbucks. It seems Starbucks was not thinking that way and taking advantage of human behavior.

ACLU and EFF Sue DOJ for info on cell tracking

Matt Richtel notes in the New York Times Bits blog that the suit was filed on Tuesday. Part of the impetus was a story he wrote in 2005 that noted that it appeared the government was doing such tracking without "probable cause" making courts uneasy. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to gain information on how and how often the government tracked cell users. The Department of Justice did not provide an answer, which prompted the joint ACLU/Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) suit.

Adobe Provides Tools to Make Flash Findable: Implications for Geo?

" Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe."

I'm going to suggest that since more and more mapping apps are using Flash, this move may help the findability of geoapps, if not geodata.

- Press Release