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!

Trending oilelefant.com, part VI

Last week I posted to relevant Linkedin Groups, a two-page extract on Slideshare of my article in the June Digital Energy Journal - the full source of Better Metadata for GIS can be found in my previous blogpost. I also updated slide 10 of my presentation on same.

Of business and blogging

A few months ago I signed up for Area 51 Satck Exchange for GIS, and it has impressive statistics indeed. Soon after, however, short holidays then family emergencies and continuing oilelefant meant that I hardly participated at all. Nor have I blogged much this month, and that situation will continue... And I missed today's AGI w3g!

2nd anniversary blog

[30 Sept. udate: I posted my Google Page Rank to the right: its jump from 2 on my website to 4 here is a further indication of how dynamic social media improve over static web. I also wrote on further social media dynamics I used in oilelefant.com last year.]

Hard to believe a year's gone by since my first anniversary blog! I compiled a few stats and posted them on Google Docs, here they are. NOTE: I don't have data where a premium is charged for it.

Transition and cleanup

Slideshare is a great venue to post presentations - it cross-posts to my LinkedIn and Twitter profiles as part of my next-gen social network - the lion's share of my recent Slideshare posts relate however to oilelefant.com I just left: I have thus moved all relevant presentations to a new Slidehsare account, henceforth managed by David Lloyd:

Another look at SAGE

Syndication, AGgregation and Entitlement were discussed here earlier. Now look at my internet presence here:

Trending oilelefant.com, Part III

The effect of trade shows and publications as well as social media can clearly be seen in the web traffic figures through June 2010.

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...

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Time for reflection coming up to the anniversary of reconnecting with my current business partner David Lloyd to help oilelefant to market.

What is next big thing?

Recent groundbreaking news abounds, and both an exciting and challenging times lie ahead.

Trending oilelefant.com, Part IV

Slideshare traffic figures show the same trend as web traffic figures posted before: monthly readership (calculated as total reads over months posted) increase from my previous papers, through Interactive Net Mapping business processes, to those on the web and social media.

Trending oilelefant.com, Part II

Recent web hit statisitics show the power of press releases (PR) in Oilvoice and FindingPetroleum (née Digital Energy Journal) to push traffic to oilelefant.com. The occasion was the new release of a secure trial area - try before you buy - to show on the internet what it will look like on the intranet.

"Free Google" e-Book review

JM Internet Group published a guide to "Free SEO, Social Media, and AdWords Resources from Google for Small Business Marketing". I am offering it an honest review as a former net'preneur - I use the internet social media round-trip to help along this blog today and oilelefant.com a while back, and shared my experiences on SlideShare. I also create web maps, and without any further technical ado let's say Google were less than forthcoming in providing help with crossing an API upgrade... This echoes  author Jason McDonald's (JM) reason to write "Free Google..." in the first place! He set out to render explicit for the rest of us what is implicit to geekdom and help 'free Google' from itself.

Roundup of web projects

Is it spring in the air or LinkedIn's new (to me) facility to post projects? Here is a round-up of various projects in the past five years as recently posted on my LinkedIn page:

Webmaps for Dummies

I posted earlier a webmap, quickly created to illustrate a point about the 2016 Olympic bid. I parlayed the custom symbology and list files into an internal app to track oilelefant prospects and customers.

"Start me up" reloaded

[ Update: watch this creepy reprise by Rolling Stones & Boston Dynamics on the 40th anniversary of the Tattoo You album ]

The 25th anniversary of Win95 launch reminded me of the cringy launch party livestreamed where I was then in Calgary. What struck me was in Rolling Stones' lyrics including "you make grown men cry" in the launch party was clipped in later adverts... 

"Who you gonna call?"

"Geo busters!" (apologies Ghost Busters).

Geodata access and availability is the real story behind the flurry of news around UK government freeing up some data, vs. Google collecting it and returning it for free, and many others. And this happens against a backdrop of various SDI (spatial data infrastrucutre) intiatives. I joined a UK government data developers mailing list, to educate myself on the ins-and-outs of data provision at the coal face, so to speak. And RDFa emerges as the way to resolve this - the more metadata one provides within any given dataset, the easier it is to classify and maintain internally, and to discover and distribute externally.

A tale of two approaches, part II

Things have moved since my previous post: even though ESRI doesn't want to be geodesign, that is high on their agenda in their business partner conference this week. And since where 2.0 among many others hail location services as the next big thing, it's no surprise Wired quotes Jack Dangermond as pushing handhelds for onsite design as I imagine it:

Once an entrepreneur...

... always an entrepreneur: 20+ years ago I started up then wound down my own petroleum GIS firm in Calgary, Canada.

A tale of two cities

Social mapping is the intersection on web mapping and social networking. I blogged earlier on webmaps and mashups, comparing streetmaps between Urumqi, the site of previous unrest in Xian province of western China, and Almaty in nearby southeast Kazakhstan. A friend who shall remain anonymous said they couldn't reach my Slideshare, so I posted a video of same on a Youtube designated channel. Now that they're safe, I post it again here.