I'm sure this was an oops in matching images to stories, but it's still amusing. From the Muskegon Chronicle via MLive.com, a news site for Michigan:

The National Geographic Society is loaning its giant vinyl map of North American to the Whitehall school district for use with its students and the general public.

The amusement: the photo shows children sitting on a map of Asia.

"You name it, they use it, but GIS is like when computers first came out. No one knows what to do with it at first, but then the say 'Oh yea, now we get it.'"

- Dr. Marcus Gillespie of the geography department at Sam Houston State University (Texas) on the nature of GIS in an article highlighting the approval of a new GIS master's degree. The program may begin by fall '09 and will support local GIS users including oil companies, gas companies, and NASA.

- Houstonian Online

Noblesville, Indiana (2006 population: 40,115, one of the fastest growing areas in the midwest) is paying San Francisco-based GIS Planning about $60,000 to host an economic development site for the next three years. The 176 properties currently listed prompted 9,600 hits (I'm guessing that's page views?) since June. There's no way to track success rates as prospective buyers work directly with sellers. The Economic Development Department staff have to input the properties for sale at noblesvilleprospector.com, but hope in time sellers will input their own data.

- Noblesville Ledger Star

Here's a very similar story for an implementation in the Spokane, Washington area. The 2009 budget: $95,000. It also cites Web stats: "129,000 page views in its first 12 months of operation."

The announcement of a geolocation add-on for Mozilla's FireFox last week prompted lots of discussion around its role in the browser, its support of standards, and its use of Skyhook's wi-fi solution for location determination. Our editors peel back the layers to take on these and other issues including: does such a broker belong in the browser?

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