While mainstream media may overlook Ron Paul and claim his base is eccentric people on the fringe of society, here are five reasons not to overlook him.

1. The “Paulites” are dominating the web

- Paul’s website had the most number of unique visitors of all Republican websites in August, according to Google analytics and the web information service Alexa. The site has also seen a 67% increase in visitors in the past three months.

- For months now, Paul has been the most popular GOP candidate on the Web, with more supporters on MySpace, Facebook and Meetup than Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney.

2. Surprising poll numbers/support among powerful groups

- Rasmussen Reports’ recent polls show Paul leading Clinton in the key demographic of voters aged 30-49, and leading all candidates both Dems and Republicans among black voters.

- RealClearPolitics Insider Advantage Poll from early October also indicated that Dr. Paul was the leading Republican candidate among Black voters in key primary state, New Hampshire.

- The Houston Chronicle reported that Paul has received the most campaign contributions from current and past military personnel.

3. Even if he “can’t win”...

Other GOP candidates should be concerned about whose support he’s taking away. In a crowded field, the money and votes he’s drawing could affect the primary outcome.

4. Republican disenchantment and the war vote

Paul has the ability to draw on the large number of Republicans who feel the party has lost its way. He offers a return to limited government and fiscal conservatism. Furthermore, as Andrew Smith, a pollster and director of the University of New Hampshire's Survey Center told the Washington Post, “In an election in which a party doesn't think it will win -- and a lot of Republicans here have a perception that no matter the nominee, they're going to lose next year -- voters have an opportunity to vote with their gut."

And with his call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, he can tempt the independents to cross over to make the protest vote against the war.

5. He’s got money

Paul shocked the political world by raising $5 million in the third quarter, 70% of which came from online donations. The money trail provides a picture of where all of these “Paulites” are cropping up.

Here are three maps showing donations from the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd quarters. As you can see, the growth along the East Coast is the most striking. It's also interesting to note how support is spreading out from metropolitan areas. For example, the areas around Chicago, Atlanta, and Houston continue to grow.

1st Quarter

2nd Quarter

3rd Quarter

Popularity: 6% [?]

In an effort to make more resources and data available to the community in regards to the San Diego fires we’ve uploaded a decent chunk of data to GeoCommons. We are tagging all the data with “San Diego fire” and will be updating GeoCommons as more data becomes available. We’ll also be putting together a separate page with data mashups and useful context about the fires, as the situation evolves. If anyone has GeoRSS, KML, or shapefiles they would like to share with the community please feel free to upload them into GeoCommons and tag them with “San Diego fire”.

Below is a quick list of data we’ve uploaded into GeoCommons related to the fires. *you can download the data without having an account but if you want to make a map with the data you’ll need to create an account and login*

October 27th, 2007 Data

HAZUS Demographic and Structure Data for San Diego

I thought it might be useful to have data on the location of structures, square footage, and demographics to overlay with the hazard data:

HAZUS - San Diego, CA Building Square Footage
HAZUS - San Diego, California - Race Demographics
HAZUS - San Diego MSA - Housing
HAZUS - San Diego MSA - Day Vehicle Count
HAZUS - San Diego MSA - Resident
HAZUS - San Diego, CA - Age Sex
HAZUS - San Diego, CA - Income
HAZUS - San Diego, CA - Building Count

Also check out Andrew Turner’s map at Mapufacture for real time data feeds

October 26th, 2007 Data

CONUS - Current Large Fires in the US - Incidents 12-24 hours ago (10:00 am Oct. 26, 2007)

CONUS - Current Large Fires in the US - Incidents 0-12 hours ago (10:00 am Oct. 26, 2007)

CONUS - Current Large Fires in the US - Current Incidents (10:00 am Oct. 26, 2007)

Structures lost from SoCal Fires as of October 26th, 2007 2:00 pm”

October 25th, 2007

-A map of fire burn areas in Southern California
-San Diego Wildfires - Structures Lost
-Home Destroyed by San Diego Wildfire in Rancho Bernardo October 25, 2007
-CONUS MODIS - Fire Detections and Current NIFC Large Wildland Fires incidents - Oct 25, 2007 2:00 pm
-San Diego Wildfires - Oct. 25, 2007 - Fire (no name, Contained)
-San Diego Wildfires - Oct. 25, 2007 - Witch Creek Fire
-San Diego Wildfires - Oct. 25, 2007 - Witch Fire and Poomacha Estimated Evacuation Area
-San Diego Wildfires - Oct. 25, 2007 - Rosa Fire (contained)
-San Diego Wildfires - Oct. 25, 2007 - Rice Fire Estimated perimeter
-San Diego Wildfires - Oct. 25, 2007 - Horno Fire
-San Diego Wildfires - Oct. 25, 2007 - Wilcox Fire
-San Diego Wildfires - Oct. 25, 2007 - Evacuation Area
-San Diego Wildfires - Oct. 25, 2007 - Harris Fire Evacuation area extension

Popularity: 13% [?]

The folks at Puhpin had a great comment they posted to our last blog entry on “free public data“. I thought there was enough interesting content to expand on the comment thread with another blog post. The Pushpin team did a great job providing far more nuanced thoughts on the issues of “for fee” data. At the end of the day my issue is truly with the government/s for not providing the data in easy to use formats or even open standard non-proprietary formats. In an open market anyone is free to take that government supplied data, make it easy to use, and charge a price the market is willing to pay. In addition to making the data easy to use many vendors also add an additional layer of quality assurance and many times value added data derivatives like forecasts.

There are many instances where vendor supplied data is truly value added and worth the money an end user pays, but there are also situations where it is not and there is a better alternative. Take for instance the 2000 Census data ESRI provides to Pushpin to resell - the added work there is taking the boundary files provided by Census and joining them to the data tables provided by the Census. I’ll be the first to admit it is tedious to do all the database joins, and it requires having pricey GIS software, but in my opinion the ratio of value add to price is way out of wack.

That is the philosophical difference with GeoCommons. If you have a community of people willing to put in that little bit of work to extract the data from places like Census and share it with the community you get a network effect. Since the data goes in under Creative Commons, anyone can take that data and combine it with their data or anyone else’s contributed data. Allowing any user to make something new and innovative with the collective data. Anytime you work to create a dataset/database there is value created and work done. Every member of OpenStreetMaps GPS-tracing roads has put in solid sweat equity, but they choose to contribute that to the community because the collective value of that data is far greater than its value alone.

In the end I believe this helps the data vendors because there is more data the market can mashup with the vendor data (vendors benefit from the network effect also). There is also a larger market of people that realize the value of the data because the barrier to entry to experience it has been removed. That said, I believe it also means the data providers are really going to have to add true value and not just do a few database joins. The real value comes in the technology and not the raw data itself. The data is what enables the technology to be more valuable.

Tim O’Reilly states that one of the key value drivers for Web 2.0 is “Data is the Intel Inside“. Specifically O’Reilly cites NAVTEQ’s proprietary database of streets as a big value drivers for many GeoWeb applications. I agree that databases (i.e. SQL is the new HTML) are creating new value propositions, but now the value is having data on the “outside” not the “inside”. The walled proprietary gardens of “inside” data are being trumped by open source “outside” data that allows a network effect to be created. With data on the “outside” not only can new combinations (data mashups) be created, but the data itself can adapt (like OpenSteetMaps and TomTom). In response to Brady’s post on the Nokeia acquisition of NAVTEQ O’Reilly comments, “the real question is going to be whether there’s a web 2.0 answer (i.e. a user-generated content) answer to the expensive data development and curation currently employed by Navteq.” I think the answer is a resounding yes and as standards like KML 3.0 progress and technologies evolve around them, the power given to the user so they can contribute meaningful data and context is only going to increase. The real value is in the technology that allows the data to be delivered, mashed up, and interconnected.

Popularity: 15% [?]

The leading Democrats have over twice as much money in the bank as their Republican counterparts. According to the Federal Election Commission reports released early this week, Clinton and Obama have a combined $65.9 million to spend, while the Republican trio of Giuliani, Thompson and Romney have $27.9.

What are the causes of this disparity?

1. Unprecedented enthusiasm/contributions from the Democrats: As Giuliani put it, the ability of Democrats to raise money this year has been “phenomenal.” To put it in perspective, consider these points from RCP blogger Tom Bevan:

- Hillary Clinton has raised nearly as much money by herself as the entire 10-person Democratic field had raised at this same point four years ago.

- Overall, Democrats have increased their cash intake by 159% versus the same period in 2003, and they've increased their primary spending by an equally impressive 133%.

2. Republican discontent with the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress: Many conservatives eagerly awaited the new wave of GOP presidential candidates, hoping for someone fresh. But judging by their pocket books, they haven’t been too excited about what they’ve seen. According to the Washington Post, “more than a third of the top fundraisers who helped elect George W. Bush president remain on the sidelines in 2008.” In fact, “more than two dozen have actually made contributions to Democrats.”

Should the GOP be concerned?

Of course the Republicans aren’t excited about trailing in the funds race, but they aren’t ready to push the panic button yet. USA Today quoted Frank Donatelli, a GOP strategist who was a senior adviser to Bob Dole during his 1996 presidential race, as saying that “Democrats are enjoying an early fundraising advantage because the political party out of the White House always develops an interest in the race earlier than the party in power." Once Democrats get closer to selecting their party's nominee, Donatelli predicts that "conservatives are going to belatedly take a harder look at the candidates and participate more fully."

And Scott Reed, a Republican strategist told the NY Times that “the bright side is that next spring, the Republicans will have plenty of money to give the candidate who goes up against Hillary Clinton.”

Assuming it is Hillary they are going up against, Republicans are going to have to battle hard in New York, the Mid Atlantic and California. Below is a map showing the number of Clinton donors by zipcode for the 3rd quarter. The five areas with the highest support are New York City, Washington DC, Chevy Chase MD, Bethesda MD, and Beverly Hills CA.

Since most polls show Giuliani as the leading Republican, let's take a look at his highest areas of support. The top five locations are New York City, Dallas TX, Greenwich CT, Saratoga Springs NY, and Houston TX.

Popularity: 5% [?]

We've been playing around lately with some new data visualization techniques, so I started poking around to see what approaches have been generating buzz of late. In the process I came across Stamen Design's very cool "Oakland CrimeSpotting" via Brady's post on O'Reilly Radar. We'd been really impressed with what they did at Where 2.0 with Trulia and their latest further pushes the frontier.

Once I was done being wowed by the visual I found, Stamen had some thoughts similar to ourselves on the importance of public data being more accessible to...well the public. Specifically,

"We’ve found ourselves frustrated by the proprietary systems and long disclaimers that ultimately limit information available to the public. As citizens we have a right to public information. A clear understanding of our environment is essential to an informed citizenry."

That is the biggest mission of GeoCommons and it is encouraging to see other folks feel similarly. The sad thing is that in order to gain easy access to much of this data folks pay third party providers. One of our developers, Minh, passed along a list of data you can buy from Pushpin, including ESRI supplied Census data. Census data comes from the government, all our tax dollars pay for it - why do we pay twice? I'm not intending to pick on ESRI or Pushpin - the whole industry does it, and for many free data sources other than Census.

The good news is there has been a real ground swell to change the market. Whether it is OpenStreetMaps, ShapeWiki, or OpenAerialMaps crowdsourcing geodata or Swivel and WeoGeo opening up public data for easy consumption there is some real momentum to change the market place and business model. Specifically on the Census front Bill, aka Mr Data McFindsAlot, just posted up Census tract level data for the entire US by state. You can download any of it as KML or access it through our data and mapping API's. Census data, though, is just the tip of the iceberg of whats out there. My latest favorite "Pirate Attacks" a detailed dataset with lat long locations of real deal pirate attacks last year.

Popularity: 15% [?]