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planetgs.com (75)
www.thegisforum.com (70)
www.spatialsciences.org.au (32)
www.bloglines.com (27)
(Page 2 of 2, totalling 11 entries)
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Tuesday, September 2. 2008
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Podcast: The Democratic Convention's Texting Map
It's not news that the Obama campaign has been a great user of technology up to this point. Last week, at the Democratic National Convention, the campaign used live maps to engage, enable and incite its supporters. We look at what was so special about this use of maps, why it worked and how the basic idea might be used elsewhere.
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Thursday, August 14. 2008
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Maps of Georgia (or lack thereof) Cause Google to Scramble; Use Virtual Earth
Where's the street map of the Republic of Georgia? Some media outlets are crying foul as Google scrambles to explain why they did not have any maps of the war-torn region. You can get satellite images for sure but the road detail is vacant. So, don't go searching for detail around Tbilisi or Gori. Miguel Helft, writing in the New York Times, interviews folks at Google who say simply that they never had very good coverage in this region and did not intentionally remove any data.
Not so for Yahoo Maps. Road data on Yahoo does exist but looks no better than the old 1:100,000 Defence Mapping Agency (now NGA) maps so it, too, is somewhat incomplete. Zooming to street level will show that neither Yahoo nor Google has any coverage.
But the winner is Microsoft Virtual Earth. Now, whether this was done recently, only they know for sure, but the road detail is excellent. Perhaps folks from the VE group can chime in here.
I would not put this all on Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Politically sensitive regions have little detail. Take the disputed region of Kashmir. It has great satellite imagery (almost too good) but no road data. And the imagery is spotty. For an interesting example, use this link to a KMZ file of Skardu, a small town in Pakistan, very close to the border with India. The imagery is extraordinary but don't pan away too far or you will lose the higher resolution image.
Posted by Joe Francica
in Politics and Mapping, Media & Maps
at
13:34
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Monday, July 28. 2008
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Map Hawk - Watching the Media and How it Uses Maps
Map Hawk is a newly launched blog that will focus on maps and mapping technology in use by the mainstream media. With the upcoming U.S. elections the Olympics and ongoing world events, Map Hawk will document and explore the use of maps in print, online and televised media. You'll find my coverage both here on APB and at MapHawk.blogspot.com. I hope you'll join the conversation, send comment s, subscribe to the daily newsletter and participate in the ongoing polls. See the first poll on how CNN should improve their mapping capabilities for the presidential election.
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Posted by Joe Francica
in Politics and Mapping, Media & Maps
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03:46
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Wednesday, May 7. 2008
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CNN Exemplifies Problems with Static Web Services in Election Coverage
Yes, I too saw John King of CNN doing the "stretch and shrink" act on the touch screen last night and Paul Well's comments notwithstanding, I have a different take. What's going simply illustrates the problem that many users of web services, like Google Earth, are and will face when it comes down to wanting more than what it was designed to do.
First, King does a fantastic job and to the extent that CNN has the right statistics at his fingertips is quite good...for what it was intended to do. What is was NOT intended to do was get down into finer demographic detail and display additional political boundaries nor could it query the political districts for certain data that King so desperately wanted at his fingertips.
The CNN political geography map web service that they constructed becomes inadequate when situations like the one that occured last night for Lake County Indiana. Lake County had votes outstanding and was late in reporting results. Everyone is focused on this single county to give them the Clinton/Obama vote given the closeness of the primary election. And here's Mr. King manually drawing in the congressional districts with his finger to try to assess where he "expected" each candidate to have a better chance of pulling votes. It didn't work. The level of voting detail was not there for him to truly predict the results. What he was trying to do was to mark the congressional district boundaries and then overlay the satellite image to those boundaries to look as rural versus urban areas. Obama was pulling better statewide from the urban areas; Clinton from the rural, white communities.
It served as an example of what happens to the expectations of users who believe that a static, web service will do just fine until there is a need to drill into the details. We saw this happen to products like MapPoint 2000 when just simple thematic mapping quickly becomes inadequate when you try to do more advanced analysis and ask questions that it was never designed to accept. The same is true for the CNN Touch Screen. It doesn't have all the boundary data like congressional district maps or precinct maps (which I am sure will be needed eventually). And while the satellite maps are nice it, seemed like Mr. King was a little ill-prepared to describe the geography other than being able to point to rural vs. urban areas and found himself not knowing some of the geography (like the I90 toll road for which he was grasping). He really needed another overlay of the road network and additional POI data.
So, I continue to revel in the CNN coverage just because the maps are now a highlight of the evening..and yet there is so much more that could be done. Linking to live vote counts by precinct? You know it's coming.
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Posted by Joe Francica
in Politics and Mapping
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08:02
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Tuesday, March 4. 2008
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CNN Adds Imagery to Primary Maps; Still Lacks Real-Time Weather
John King, the newsman turned GIS expert for CNN during the U.S. presidential primaries, has been adding functionality to his Google election coverage maps. In Tuesday's Ohio primary specifically, King and anchor Wolf Blitzer were reporting on a lawsuit filed by Barack Obama to keep polling locations open because of the ice storm hitting the state. As King zoomed into Cuyahoga County to highlight the areas hit by the ice storm he was left with a huge hole in his coverage. Where's the ice, snow? Lacking an integrated live weather feed, King was simply showing a static satellite image of downtown Cleveland. So, while imagery was added to the election coverage, it seems like King wanted even more to describe the situation.
I like what The Weather Channel has done with the integration of live weather and Microsoft Virtual Earth. Will live weather be next in election coverage? It's coincidental that The Weather Channel is running a series called "When Weather Changed History." In the case of the primaries, weather may very well have been a factor in the primaries. Just watch what happens in November.
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Posted by Joe Francica
in Politics and Mapping
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20:02
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(Page 2 of 2, totalling 11 entries)
November 22
This functionality builds on the huge [...]
Briantist about Seen During Geography Awareness Week IV
November 21
Perhaps there should be an on-screen [...]
SMR about Seen During Geography Awareness Week IV
November 20
This is very funny. Google Earth has [...]
Claudio Schapsis about Twitter Geo API Available
November 20
Location on Twitter is not new. There [...]
Kirk Kuykendall about Why I got an e-mail from Wolfram Research
November 19
It's also worth watching Wolfram Alpha. [...]
Adena Schutzberg about Why I got an e-mail from Wolfram Research
November 19
You are correct! [...]
Archie Belaney about Update 5: AT&T Sues Verizon over "Map for That" Map Ads
November 19
If you're advertising 3g coverage is [...]