The winter season is upon us and the cold weather is giving people the itch to run off to the ski slopes. Unfortunately, in Washington DC this requires a flight to the west coast or a drive out to east coast mountains to partake in the winter recreation. Going out to the west is a tough option for many east coast city folk. This blog is intended to help the urban dwellers of Washington, DC not only find a close resort in the area, but also find a ski shop where they can find the necessary equipment to shred the fresh powder.

The first map I have is one of all the ski shops that around the Washington DC area. The dataset can be found in Finder! at http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/8388 The map can be found at http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/2030 Click on the picture for a larger view or click on the previous maker map for an interactive map.

The next map now combines the location of Washington DC, the ski shops in the area, and ski resorts that are close by in Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and Southern Pennsylvania. The dataset can be found at http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/8389 and the map can be found at http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/2029

Hopefully with all this information from Finder! and Maker! you will now be able to make a trip to the mountains and ski to your heart’s content!

Popularity: 9% [?]

Flickr recently published the areal shapes of place names based on geotagged photos. Tom Taylor quickly developed a visualization for any particular place name.
The shapes are irresistible. We added a few locations into Geocommons. The data includes counts of the number of photos taken for any particular place name. For a better idea of what this looks like, take a look at San Francisco flickr data on OpenStreetMap:

At almost any scale, photos are tagged exponentially more to some locations, often those next to water or places with grand vistas of iconic landmarks. I wondered whether this was tourists, so I overlayed Emily’s data on hotels in paris:

One can see that the photos here still snake their way along the water, and they also pop up by Père Lachaise Cemetery and on top of Montmartre. Click on the image to browse the same map with Velib stations included.
Finally, I wondered whether it was just geeks like myself who geo-tagged their photos, so I loaded the crunchbase and flickr data into a global map:

Hooray for crowd-sourced data. There are a lot of interesting possibilities for the flickr data: information about the tags (e.g. “disgust”, “architecture”) within each polygon, layering on topo maps, or layering on landmarks.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Many companies are on Twitter, but how are they using this social media tool? Glenn Letham of GISuser discusses how organizations, for example ESRI, use Twitter to keep their readers informed of industry and company news as well as a communication tool to their customers. Letham encourages other GIS/Geo Technology companies to use Twitter as a medium for customer relations and technical assistance. Follow us on Twitter!

Harvard launched AfricaMap. The map is based on the Harvard University Geospatial Infrastructure (HUG) platform and was developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis.  AfricaMap, a OpenLayers-based app, aims to expand existing initiatives for globally sharing spatial data and technology. 

Google Maps created a fun quiz where you get to test your geographic puzzle solving skills. To play the quiz, you have to rearrange letters in a map, using visual clues in the form of a Panoramio photograph, to spell a world capital or U.S. state capital.

The USGS National Geospatial Program Office launched a new version of The National Map website. Revisions include The National Geospatial Program and The National Map web site.

Discussions about the auto industry bailout have been percolating the blogosphere. How would this affect auto industry workers? CNN created an interactive map showing the number of auto industry jobs in each state.

Popularity: 25% [?]

The U.S. Department of Education has a link on their website to The Equity in Athletics Data Analysis Cutting Tool, which allows visitors to download spreadsheets that show financial information about equity in college athletics. The universities that the data accounts for are US college universities that receive Title IV funding. What that basically means is that these colleges participate in federal student aid programs, which a majority of college universities do.

Considering that I was a rower in college, I was pleased to find this data. I was particularly interested in seeing what it would look like if I mapped out the college universities that have rowing programs and then by using proportion symbols, I could see which colleges had the biggest revenues. The following map displays revenues of collegiate rowing teams for both male and female programs combined in 2007:

(Click Finder! to view the data set)

Now to give you an idea of what each college rowing program revenue looks like by gender, the following map is broken down by female revenue and male revenue using proportion symbols to show the amount of revenue comparatively.

(Click map or Maker! to view map)

Popularity: 24% [?]