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.

A tale of two conferences

I watched online the keynotes of the GEOINT and the FOSS4G shows this week. Aside from their excellent content, I was astounded that they used not one but two references that are similar... The word convergent evolution came to mind, much along the theme in both keynotes! I pulled the key points from the videos last night, and posted the parallel on SlideShare.

Data tennis match

There is a frantic discussion over the UK Government Data Developers mailing list, over freeing UK postcodes, after the recent freeze of their provision to UK aid agencies. As a business user (not a developer) I use free area code data (kilometer precision), and paid my £50 for 1000 points from postcodeanywehere.co.uk (meter precision). This doesn't negate the need to call for freeing up data sources, but as business I must be practical and timely.

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.

What's in a name or an acronym?

A quick lunchtime post of multiple meanings recently seen:

Crowdsourcing for Dummies

James Fee points out Google's Michael Jones on crowdsourcing in Directions Magazine. But let's not forget the "other" democratisation of the geoweb: the tools and online community to help post geodata of any source you choose.

"East is east and west is west...", or is it?

Geo-meta-data news flashes:

quickly access web resources regardless of resource location via ESRI's geoportal extension

free metadata tools for the EU INPSIRE website using ESRI Irelands Be-Inspired site

quickly add data anywhere in the world, crowdsourcing debut on Google Map Maker

geocode data into the recently increased Google palette in the US at least announced

Time, place and social networks

Last week saw the feverish conclusion of the award of the 2016 Olympic host city. One key factor reported by the Guardian was the following (numbers appear to be from summer and winter Olympics):

The Joy of (con)Text

It's a common geo-rant (thanks AGI'09) that metadata cause alternatively boredom or angst among geo-geeks - why? because we know our data, our professional audience does too, but our wider audience does not. In other words, if we don't write metadata, no-one else will understand the context later on. I found a clear example, when I mapped Captain Cook's ships logs a while ago, and posted on ArcGIS Online beta:

The Joy of Sets

Set Theory was the first disruptive technology I experienced as a boy - perhaps my web diagram to the right was influenced by that? As it turned out sets made binary thinking cool in the new era of computing, as they did holistic thinking in business management. In earth sciences it helped correct the linear thinking of chronologically evenly spaced events, into that of long periods of quiescence punctuated with bursts of evolution or catastrophic events - and now that we look for asteroids and tsunamis in history, we find them galore.