Wednesday, November 26. 2008

Huge Savings on In-house GIS

"Creating the system in-house saved the county about $2 million, [Anoka County GIS coordinator John] Slusarczyk said. Completing a digital annotation layer to the system saved the county $1.4 million, he said."

- Star-Tribune

MapQuest Positions itself Against Google Maps

"Google Maps may be gaining ground in terms of unique visitors but our user engagement and value proposition is very different than Google Maps. Visitors to MapQuest are far more engaged as we are actually a destination website."

That's Mark Law, Vice President of Product Development at Mapquest in an interview at Search Engine Land. While he and and Christian Dwyer, Senior Vice President & General Manager, do their best to draw the lines between the offerings, I think users are seeing things in a bit more blurred way.

Much Ado About Pegman

Hey, if folks like a little animated man to help them use Google's StreetView, that's fine. Alas, a different interface innovation is getting short shrift: access to "report a concern." Says a commenter on VentureBeat:

The 'report a concern' link is now directly at the bottom of the Street View. Before you had to click help and find the link in the information window that opened.

That true - but it's a sort of "watermark" like the (c)Google 2008 beside it, so you'd likely not know it's there, unless you read this post. I hope others will help spread the word on this interface change and perhaps encourage Google to make it a bit more visible.

Tuesday, November 25. 2008

UK Releases "Place Matters" Location Strategy for UK

The report had been held up, (I noted it in my coverage of AGI GeoCommunity exactly a month ago) but is now available free here.

The press release explains there's a five point approach:

The Location Strategy sets out a Five-Point Action Plan for public services that will help them to:

- know what data we have and avoid duplicating it
- use common reference data so we know we are talking about same places
- share the data easily through common technology, standards and business relationships
- gain the appropriate skills to support its use
- drive strong governance to enable change which will be led by the Location Council which is being set up by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

AGI (Association for Geographic Information) offers its take here, which basically supports these five ideas and notes AGI's work in these areas.

Tim Warr (Multimap) offers his quick take specifically noted the push for eased licensing.

Ed Parsons seems to be suggesting something about a job in Southampton (home the Ordnance Survey)...

These goals do not sound like any really new (for any country) tackling geodata issues/use but they do highlight how complex it can be to actually get them done! This looks like a decent reference document for any country (or smaller region) to explore when considering its spatial data infrastructure (SDI).

Music Video: Map of the World as We Know it

StevenRussellJr tipped me off to what I consider a brilliant take on REM "It's the End of the World" updated to "It's a Map of the World." This is a great follow up to last year's "Be Our Guest" rewritten as "G-I-Yes!"

As someone who has actually tried to sing the original REM song with the lyrics in front of me, I'm impressed by anyone who can speak all those words, let alone be articulate about it. Oh, and these are really clever lyrics, too. I'd appreciate any further info on the lyricist/performers.

Continue reading "Music Video: Map of the World as We Know it"

Old Poll, New Poll

Update: Actually set the new poll this time! Oops!

--- original post 11/19/098 ------------

A month ago we asked: What single factor besides pure functionality most influences your selection of a geospatial software app? With just 13 votes it's hard to take the results too seriously, but here they are:

Ease of Use/Interface - 62%
Data format support - 16%
Support for standards - 16%
Something else - 8%
Speed - 0%
Cross platform support - 0%
Extensibility - 0%
Print/output capability - 0%

On to the next poll: How important is it that a job candidate be familiar with more than one GIS product/platform? Vote in the lower right hand side of our main page.