Top tips for engaging online communities

From the Press Association PR & Communications Newlsetter today:

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.

The power of context, Part V

The tropical storm threatening the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) oilspill cleanup shows up very well in Google Earth (download GE here) by simply using:

• EPA's Deepwater Horizon - Gulf Spill Response KML shown previously
• Google Earth latest release's legend that comes complete with ocean data
  

The power of context, Part IV

Two anecdotes on remote sensing and environmental monitoring highlight some issues in measuring and predicting the current Gulf of Mexico oil rupture.

A bit of GIS history

As I watch ESRI's 2010 User Conference remotely via social media and my favorite bloggers like spatialsustain and spatiallyadjusted, this entry from allpointsblog caught my eye:

The power of context, Part III

[Update: I noted on many of my Google Fusion Table posts that, while the data are still on Google Drive for you to view, GFT no longer offers a polygon or heatmap option, only geocoding by country centroid in its new version. Not sure why, but on this, this, this and another example posted as Iframes not Scripts preserved the old GFT maps.]

Ruth Lang created this excellent mashup for the 2010 FIFA World Cup - which coloured all the countries at the beginning and gradually greys them out as they are eliminated - only Spain and the Netherlands are left as at today. This was a labour of love, needing for example some tweeking to work in the Firefox browser, and a testament to SVG.

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.

The power of context, Part II

In preparation for tomorrow's TEDxOilSpill meet-up in Cambridge UK, let me highlight two among the many, many postings on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (I also wrote about here and here).

The power of context...

... can be seen in a simple weekend exercise: look up your favourite area on your handy 3D online maps, and you just might get a slew of features, some of it unwanted...

bp oil rupture, Part II

Here the latest from bp itself at the current NOC show in London.