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 author

We’ve been swamped with work on our enterprise product, but finally found a bit of time to push some new updates to the GeoCommons public site. So, we’ve added the following new hotness to Finder! and Maker! for your mapping enjoyment:

1. New color ramps – (the cartographers designed the top row to compliment Google Terrain and the bottom row for Virtual Earth Road. They also look good with the other base maps!)

2. Simplified Uploader – (just pick one file and we’ll figure out the rest)

3. Embed functionality – (share your maps across the web as a sydicatable widget, just click the “details” button on any map)

4. Prj support – (break the bonds of the WGS 84 and load any projection into GeoCommons to share and map)

5. Geoparsed txt files – (with the help of MetaCarta upload your text documents and have the locations plotted on the map along with hyperlinked text navigation)

6. New Maker! load bar and layer identifyer – (some of the data layers in GeoCommons can be pretty big so we added a load bar that identifies the name of each data layer you load)

We are aiming to make for more regualr updates, and the coolest features are yet to come so stay tuned. To provide some incentive to check out the new features and raise awareness for Earth Day we are running a contest – ‘GeoCommons Goes Green’.

Just upload a compelling dataset and/or make a map pertaining to sustainability, climate change, civic initiatives or any other theme that promotes awareness and education of environmental issues. Tag your dataset and map with the contest tag “GCgreen” and FortiusOne’s panel o’ judges will choose the best dataset/map on May 11th . Winners will receive the following fabulous prizes:

First Prize: Planet Earth 5 DVD Set

Third Prize: Stickers printed with your Maps!

Join in and help mobilize the GeoCommons Community in our efforts to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s environment.

We are always looking for feedback, so let us know what you think of the new features, and if we missed soemthing you are dying to see on GeoCommons definitely let us know.

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