So it’s happening again! The entire country will spend another Sunday with friends and family watching the Super Bowl (or at least checking out the commercials) and drinking beer. In honor, I thought I should put a dataset on Finder! on beer consumption in the US by state. The map below may give you an idea of which states will be drinking the most beer on Sunday.

To view this map in Maker! click here.

Also, in case you had to run out last minute to buy beer for the occasion, here is a map of sunday alcohol sales bans by state (off premises). If you live in one of the orange states, make sure you buy your beer on Saturday, or else you’ll be drinking apple juice!

To view this map in Maker! click here.

Popularity: 8% [?]

In the last post I whinged about what I thought was wrong with the various “geo” stimulus proposals, so I thought in this post I would talk about what I think is right. In short the value is in the data and making the data available to the public. Making data available and transparent to the public is what the administration wants to do, and they are writing the checks. This is different than making technology, infrastructure or even maps available to the public.

Make government data a public good at all levels - local, tribal, state, and federal. Expose the data on the Web in commonly used formats. If that format is a standard great, but it does not necessarily need to be. Shapefile is not a standard but data should be made available in the format because it is commonly used and many different technologies can consume it. Same goes for GeoRSS.

I think the greatest cost/benefit ratio can be from something this simple. Sean Gillies is correct that providing access to the raw data is more valuable than web services. The technology community is going to do a much better job making the data available as either web services or web destinations than the government will. We, the community, complain about how lousy government mapping sites are yet we, the tax payers, continue to pour tons of cash into building and maintaining them.

The examples of great technology being built on top of open data grows longer every day - EveryBlock (municipal data), Cloudmade (OpenStreetMap), Apps for Democracy (DC govt. data), Apps for America (Sunlight Foundation), Google Transit (municipal data), FixMyStreet and TravelMaps (MySociety.org), NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas (TIGER line data). I’m sure folks can add several more, this is just the tip of the iceberg. In each one of these examples companies or non-profits have sprung up on top of open data. Each one of these companies creates jobs, innovation, and competition in the market place. The data is no less valuable if one company uses it or a hundred do. It is a classic public good, which means the government can invest in it without tilting the market.

The New York Times has a great piece about providing stimulus to the technology sector. Robert Hall, an economist at Stanford, warns that providing stimulus to niche fields (which geo surely is) pushes funding to “a bunch of specialists, where if we raised spending quickly, the limited number of competent suppliers would be in short supply and get increased incomes,”. The result being an unbalanced playing field that only generates a few jobs with a minimal number of vendors.

While I believe this all looks good on paper there are still some challenges to efficiently making government data available as a public good. The biggest issues will be making it easily discoverable, since government data inherently resides in stove pipes across the Web. Many will pop in at this point and say, Spatial Data Infrastructure! Then we are right back to square one. Instead we could go for an easily implemented method allowing government agencies to expose their data for indexing and federation. Let the private sector build the infrastructure to discover the data and deliver it to the consumer. Do most people find local data through their municipal GIS map portal or Google/Yahoo/MS/Yelp/EveryBlock. My greatest fear is that a national SDI/GIS will just be a glorified municipal data portal.

The same will hold true for data at every other level of government. A lot of people have spoken on making raw government data publicly available. It is not a new problem, and that is exactly the point. Let’s not invent a problem that does not exist and hope we can get a chunk of the bailout. Instead solve a problem that already exists and use the rare opportunity of “collective will” within the government to jump start it. The cost is minimal and the potential economic stimulus is large. The market remains open and balanced.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Having spent a little time in California, it always surprised me to hear how just about everyone who has lived here for an extended time has experienced an earthquake at some point or another.  Considering that I grew up in South Florida earthquakes were never a direct concern, but now that I have spent a little time in the Bay Area I was curious about areas that have recently been affected by earthquakes, and San Francisco in particular.

One of the guys I work with, Kevin, regularly loads weekly updated data into Finder! from the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) data catalog about earthquake magnitudes. The data includes recorded magnitudes of 1 or greater from earthquakes around the world.  I put together the following map that shows the the Bay Area where a small earthquake was recorded in the Pacific Ocean off of the west coast of San Francisco in the past week.

Click the map to view in Maker!

Something else I added in the aforementioned map is a layer of hazardous zones in San Francisco where liquefaction can happen as a result of an earthquake.  Liquefaction and landslides can happen when a confined layer of sandy or silty saturated material is knocked loose from the shaking caused by earthquakes.  This warrants serious concern in San Francisco and surrounding areas because much of residential areas are built on the hilly geography.

If you zoom out on the above map or click the follow map below you can see where other areas around the world have recorded earthquakes with a magnitude of 1 or greater in the past week:

Click map to view in Maker! Click to view dataset in Finder!

Popularity: 8% [?]

I was looking over the various geo related “stimulus” proposals and began to wonder where is the “demand” coming from. It is obvious where the “supply” is coming from. I think just about every large geo company I can think of has their name on a proposal. Is the customer the federal government, state/local government, citizens (the public), the economy writ large?

The more cynical side of me says that spatial data infrastructures (SDI) are a solution looking for a problem. Since it has the word “infrastructure” in the title I can see the appeal, but is this really what the masses are clamoring for. I think “masses” is the key word here, because if we are building something for the GIS community or even the Geoweb community we are missing the boat and the point. I’d argue we’ve made more progress on making geodata available to the public in the past three years doing the opposite of SDI’s. Bottoms up defacto standards that are adopted widely - KML or GeoRSS come to mind. How much did that cost?

Fred Wilson’s post on Selflessness vs. Selfishness sums it up well, “I realize that it’s a good idea to allow everyone to throw out their ideas and suggestions. But when people are plotting about how they can “spin” their pet project as “infrastructure” spending, it’s gone too far.” I’m as bullish on the potential of the Geoweb as anyone, but I think we have to ask some hard questions. What is the customer really demanding? Further, what is the cheapest way we can deliver the most value to the customer? How can fulfilling those demands best grow the economy?

Is there a role for “geo” in driving an economic recovery - definitely. Should the role of “geo” in the recovery be shaped by vendors - probably not. We’ve had some lively conversations on what problems need to be solved in the office, and I’ll get a post up on it specifically, but would love to hear what other folks think. Maybe I’ve not read all the proposals in enough detail and given them short shrift. Was the public clamoring for SDI’s and National GIS’s before there was a $850 billion dollar pot of money to go after?

Popularity: 11% [?]