Anniversary blog

Even though I registered my blog in September 2005, I started blogging on 18 August 2009, no small thanks to my blog friend Hussein Nasser and the blogging geocommunity in London and elsewhere. I recently twittered these stats, and thank all for your help along the line:

azolnai: 1st anniversary blogging math: (72 blog posts + 797 tweets + RSS feed) * output = (100 Twitter+ 501 LinkedIn + 95 Facebook) * followers

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.

SAGE: Syndication, AGgregation & Entitlement

For-free vs. for-fee is an issue that won't go away any time soon. I discussed this here before, and it came up recently with the adoption of OpenStreetMap on Bing Maps and arcgis.com. In a macro sense it's about data, systems and traffic control, as evidenced by the lock-down of Google search and Blackberry access in China and parts of the Middle East, respectively. At a micro scale it came up in a discussion group on LinkedIn: who owns map symbology derived from public sources?

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.