Monday, August 24. 2009

Old Poll, New Poll

A while back we asked: What motivates you to view a geospatial video online? Sixty one people responded.

45% - Nothing would motivate to watch a geo video.
25% - Someone I know says it's good and says why it's good.
19%- I watch because I'm searching for geospatial videos.
9% - Someone I know says it's good.
5% - "Someone" says it's good.

Next up: How much of your geospatial work is done using desktop GIS? Vote on the lower right hand side of our main page.

ESRI Opens New Learning Center in Redlands

ESRI's old Learning Center (where I believe I learned Arc/INFO in 1992) was getting too small. So ESRI acquired and updated a 1950s building that once served as a grocery and later as a fabric store. The new 10,000-square-foot Learning Center has four classrooms and can hold up to 60 students at a time. There's also room for offices and storage on the second floor.

- Redlands Daily Facts

As Election Near, Another Mayor Offers Service Request Portal

Last week Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco launched a data portal for the city. He's going to run for governor of California.

Today Thomas Menino, Mayor of Boston launched a GIS portal that highlights citizen reported issues and their status on a map. He's facing two young challengers for his position in a primary in a few weeks. The site is called the "Boston GIS Data Hub."

It's built on ESRI ArcGIS API for Flex. The key reason for the map - transparency about service requests - is accessed through a special icon of a cell phone under the TOC title "Business Data." It opens up a multi-tabbed window that includes the ability to search for service requests and their status. By default they are not mapped. To map them the user must find a mapping button at the bottom of the spreadsheet of the matching records.

- Boston Herald

Of Clouds and Standards

There is now a group forming to promote standards and interoperability of cloud computing. Last week, the Open Group announced formation of the Cloud Work Group.

The objectives of the group, as you can guess, are "the effective and secure use of cloud computing within enterprise architectures, based on open standards. The Open Group Cloud Work Group prioritizes collaboration on standard models and frameworks, aimed at enterprises looking to benefit from cloud products and services." In the announcement, the group says it is looking to collaborate with other "relevant organizations."

Hello, OGC!

[Also, check out the Clouds standards wiki]

The Cycle Repeats

In the past few years pretty much all communications could be geotagged in one way or another.

E-mails could be geotagged, social networking apps could share location and soon, with a new API from Twitter, individual tweets will be geotagged. Each time the press repeats the cycle: this is bad, people can stalk you, will rob you when they know you are not home, people will "fake their location"...

Yes, that's all true and has been true with every implementation before this one. How, really, are geotagged tweets any different from what's come before? Is Twitter that much more important or real time or whatever that the impact will be different? Nextweb seems to think this is the first time any messages were geotagged in its Six Reasons why Twitter Geolocation is a really, really bad idea (do note the TWO "reallys").

If you feel the need to play in this world of sharing location, I encourage you to do so. But, look first at tools to manage that sharing beyond the apps themselves. Consider Fire Eagle (which I've gone on about before) and even new "limited time based" sharing services like Glympse (Fire Eagle folks - can you add that?)

Yelp Mobile: Bing Maps on Blackberry, GMaps on iPhone

TechCrunch notes the launch of the Yelp Blackberry app (Yelp is a restaurant review service) and the difference in map platform. So, why go Bing when Google was used for the previous app on the other platform?

Per the article: "Yelp says that Bing was used because the search engine provided map tile access, which was essential for movable maps on the app."