Links List 12.19.08
December 19th, 2008by Sean Gorman
About the Author: Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users.
Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this authorMany 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% [?]
December 19th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Seth,
AfricaMap is based on OpenLayers, not “Google Maps” directly.
December 19th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Who is Seth?
December 19th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Sean:
The guy who I was talking to on AIM at the time. Both names start with “Se”, it was an honest mistake!
(Also, OpenLayers is one word…)
December 19th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Sean,
Very fun and timely post. At AWhere, we just had a company conversation about Twitter and how it has migrated from pure personal social into personal business and now into corporate twitts. (Pun partially intended)
We just started a corporate twit. Would love to have anyone who wishes to join us:
twitter.com/awhere
We are trying to use it in a running stream of brief comments on notable notes about the business. Thoughts on interesting applications of business geo-analysis and geo-visualization. Public events etc. I will be running through the list you provided to see how others are using and trying to catch some best practices.
Thanks!
Jim
December 19th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Hey Chris –
No worries – to be honest the PR folks do the links list and I did not click on all the links to double check – lesson learned. Apologies for the gaffe.
best,
sean
December 19th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Sean:
Oh, no problem. I’m just particularly aware of this one because I had my hands in pieces of it: AfricaMap development helped fund the web-based TileCache configuration tool (http://svn.tilecache.org/trunk/tilecacheconfig/). Also, I’m somewhat protective of apps using OpenLayers — we lose enough of our street cred to being ‘yet another mapping app’ without things that are actually based on OpenLayers being misattributed!
(Not that I’m one to speak on misattribution here, “Seth”
)
December 21st, 2008 at 10:55 am
Cool – I really like AfricaMap. The integration with GeoNetwork is nice – great to be able to go the source data.
Has the community thought about adding something like “Powered by OpenLayers” to apps that use it? Maybe a small logo? Unfortunately I think many folks associate tiles with the technology driving an application