More creative Maps

I ran across these interesting web-mapping innovations - three on data consumption (multi-modal maps on steroids) and two on data creation (down to earth to outer space).

Trending oilelefant.com, part V

Quarterly traffic figures to oilelefant.com show a pickup after the traditional summer lull. Of interest is the increase mostly due to visits outside my blog-twitter-web trio in slide 4 below. While next quarter may give us more details on this trend, it does suggest that readership is spreading across the web. Is this a new form of syndication that occurs naturally, like plants seeded in a garden without the garderner's intervention? If this is a form of crowdsourcing, then the twitter logo may be serendipitous... as birds are a main carrying agent of garden volunteers!

What's in a name? Part II

Tim O’Reilly started the Web 2.0 movement via eponymous show a few years ago. Gov 2.0 was his iteration of same in Washington DC last week. In the All Points Blog podcast on same, APB Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg said:

...not only are they [gov. GIS sites] really, really useful, people don't think of them as GIS, they're apps: they happen to have maps in them, you get your answers to your questions...