Reading Social Web Maps

Look at this map, and what it doesn't show is as instructive as what it shows. You guessed it, it's the low number of social media hits - anyone on the blogosphere or twitterverse would find those numbers on the low side, especially considering the passion current events in Egypt generated on the ground and online - and I wager doesn't reflect poor map making, but rather the fact the web was tampered with during the events in Egypt.

IQPC show in Kuwait City

Attended this small and personable show and met some friends old and new - vendors were invited into the talks and plenty of time was left in between to meet&greet.

2D or not 2D, Part Deux

As a 3D aficionado I just had to repost these two YouTube videos, courtesy of a Wired UK article: Kinect hack builds 3D maps of the real world. It goes to show how far lateral thinking can go if you let "boys play with their toys" to make Google Labs or Microsoft Research drool. I'll just let the article and following videos speak for themselves, and you draw your own conclusions...

Web maps and Skype

Brisbane floods in eastern Australia affect areas I grew up in, and where friends still live. There are many map resources online through news media, for example Ushahidi community flood reporting map on ABC News, showing maps becoming mainstream.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year

Xmas card

An excellent GIS repository

This summer I followed the ESRI User conference via twitter, which put me onto their excellent video resource page. That was great as it has not been easy, even after 25 years, to tell friends and family what I “spend just all hours of the day and days of the seasons and years”. That sound bite is from this video, which I found the best intro for “the rest of the world”.

Google Fusion Coffee Table

[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.]

Geocurrents posted this interesting dataset from Worldbank's Ease of Doing Business website. James Fee waxed rhapsodic over Google Fusion Tables after WhereCamp5280. So I decided to see how easy it really was to map their Ease of doing Business Rank.

Not work not geo: photo edits

As I started posting more photos on Flickr! in Kuwait, I toyed with simple improvements that adjust color and contrast. It helps mitigate over-exposure bright desert sunlight, and remove 'haze' in difficult lighting such as high altitude flying or mountains, or add virtual fill-in flash enhancing dark foregrounds. I cannot however help with the original pixel count - my phone camera has a decent 3.2 mpels @ 300dpi, but lower-res scans of JPEG settings cannot be helped much especially in sharpening due to their low pixel count.

Back home again

TS Eliot's header quote indicates that I'm back home again: to bridge geoscience and GIS in petroleum I've done for a while now - see on my LinkedIn how long - it isn't hard to believe then, that I dusted off a master data management diagram from over a decade ago:

Mappliance (continued)

Tripit is a neat app I use via LinkedIn to post my trips: