REI's Rico Simpkins, Online Community Development Manager, speaks about the past, present and future of REI. Up until now, REI's Internet presence has been merchandise-based. REI's new goal is to bring the community they foster in their stores, to the Web, part of which is getting users to share vacation information such as user-generated maps of their travels. In Rico's words, he wants to develop an "online" community that gets people "offline."
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Ed. Note: The Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks Group is about sharing, teaching, learning and networking around current and future Web-based geospatial and social networking applications and technology. The group meets regularly on the third Tuesday evening of every month at Google in Silicon Valley, CA. Back Five Productions and Endpoint Environmental LLC are the producers of the Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks Meetup Group podcasts, which are sponsored by Directions Media.

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I attended a webinar today conducted by Park Associates on how GPS is influencing the portable device market and specifically the personal navigation device (PND) market. As we are constantly being asked how big any particular segment of the geospatial and LBS martkets are, I wanted to share some of their insights with you:

CNN lead the way with fairly substantial usage of Google Maps during the U.S. presidential primary elections. With the general election coming up, how can the news media make it better? More geographic detail? More real-time information? Take the poll at our new Map Hawk blog.

We had a reader ask if any of the AEgis Technologies 3D models of the Olympic venues had actually been shown during the broadcasts because they had not seen any so far. Scott Allman from AEgis provides this response: