Tuesday, May 5. 2009

Quote of the Week

"And the street will be on MapQuest, which we are very excited about."

- Castle View High School student John Atha quote on YourHub Denver, on the city's approval of name change of the street to the school to "Sabercat Way" from "Elegant Street."

"New Geographer" Column in Forbes

Yes, I've been noting the many columns by Matt Woolsey at Forbes that tap ZoomProspector for yet another list of places of some sort in the US (another one yesterday!) but I only heard that the publication has an online "New Geographer" column the other day.

That column is by Joel Kotkin, who wrote a book of roughly the same name in 2000. I'm thinking you could not have a "New Geographer" column in print, now could you? His columns are here.

It's great that Forbes is embracing "new" or even "old" geography.

MN County Leads the Way in Implementing National Grid

You remember the US National Grid (USNG)? That federal standard for creating unique locations for points on the ground that will ideally put local responders and others "on the same map" when they travel outside their local area?

Dakota County, Minnesota is among the "most aggressive counties" in the state to embrace it. The local paper refers to the National Grid as a "lesser-known standard for federal agencies." Steve Swazee, a Northwest Airlines pilot and retired Navy captain sits on a governor's council related to mapping and geographic information, has been active on state efforts to promote the grid as the new standard. Unfortunately, the article doesn't explain what prompted the county to jump in and how the "promotion" and adoption of the grid is executed or funded. That'd be valuable information to share.

I did learn that on "March 25, [USNG] was accepted by the Minnesota Governor's Council on Geographic Information." It's not a requirement in the state but is promoted as a standard.

Pioneer Press

SAIC Offers Custom Processed Landsat Scenes: Details

A press release from SAIC details its "innovative, web-based processing system delivering custom Landsat imagery directly to customer desktops." Recall that you can download imagery free from USGS and process it yourself. But if you want, you can have SAIC do it. I dug around for the details not included in the release.

Continue reading "SAIC Offers Custom Processed Landsat Scenes: Details"

Podcast: Why would a Hyperlocal News Site Drop Maps?

This week we take a look at YourStreet, at one time a cutting edge hyperlocal site that tapped into key location technologies. Last week in an e-mail the company explained that due to cost it was dropping maps. The upside? Pages load faster. We'll try to think through the logic of this move and the future of hyperlocal news.


Subscribe to Podcast RSS

Listen Now (to download, right click on the link at left and choose "save target as")

Read the show notes

Missed any podcasts? Want to subscribe via iTunes, Yahoo, etc? Here's the index .