Tuesday, June 2. 2009

All Signs Point to Better Location Info in Twitter

Silicon Alley Insider offers this evidence:

- The company hired Ryan Sarver, who left Skyhook Wireless.

- Twitter's API lead Alex Payne reportedly said the company "would make other changes to support search, including adding location based info to each Tweet."

The article goes on to review how location information is currently added to Twitter (oddly, no mention of Fire Eagle or Brightkite...) and what may be ahead (Loki, Quova). There's also a suggestion, and I think this is a good one, that enhanced location information will make Twitter far more useful to potential paying business customers, where the company hopes to make some money.

How to Locate (Black and White) Penguins on (Black and White) Ice

The answer: use color! The color of Emperor penguin guano. The reddish stains appears very visible from satellites and are helping British Antarctic Survey scientists find new colonies and note those that disappear as antarctic ice melts and reshapes.

- Skynews
- audio from BBC

Nominations for the Most Influential People in Geospatial: 2010 and Beyond

Directions Media is looking for the individuals who will influence geospatial technology for the next five years. Many, many people have helped get us to we where we are today; their names fill the textbooks and magazines of the last 35 years. Who will fill those shoes in the coming years?

We'd like your help in identifying these individuals. They may be from the public, private or educational arena, from geospatial industry or not, programming or politics. To start, we are asking for nominations from the geospatial community. It'll take just a few moments to share a person's name, title and a few sentences explaining why they should make the list. We'll review the nominations and cull down the list. Then we'll ask the community to vote to tease out the top ten later this summer. 

Click Here to Enter Your Nomination

Kleenex, Hayfever, Twitter, Map

If you roll those together you get a map of hayfever suffering in the UK. Kleenex is asking UK residents to tweet how bad their symptoms are, along with a postcode, to create a map. I see but 4 dots on the map so far, though it's unclear when this launched.

Strange:

(1) An "unbranded" version of the site is hosted by "altogetherhosting.com" here.
(2) Kleenex does not seem to be on twitter and thus no tweets asking for input to the map.
(3) The coverage I found did not link to either map!

- via Mad.co.uk

Podcast: A Geospatial Look at Data.gov

Last week the federal government launched data.gov, a data portal to enhance transparency. What's in it for geospatial practitioners and how will the new offering evolve? Our editors share their thoughts on the current offering and some possible paths forward.


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