We are all set up here in cosmopolitan Burlingame for the fun of Where 2.0. Thus far we’ve sat in on Advanced GIS Hacks in Rails and are currently enjoying the GeoServer tutorial. There is a bit of a lull in the action, so I thought I would talk about something completely different.

Specifically, I got an email with a link saying Google was going to be launching “Friend Connect” at Where 2.0. Problem is I’ve not read anything on the blogs or else where that has talked about Friend Connect having a geospatial component.

It would be awesome if they’ve enabled something to embed your location into a social profile, but seems like that would be more ambitious than what has been outlined in the press releases and speculation. Google does have a talk tomorrow on the “State of the GeoWeb”, maybe we’ll find out there. Has anyone heard rumors one way or the other?

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We’ve been doing work recently integrating GeoServer with GeoCommons to provide more hooks and capabilities for our platform. I was catching up reading the GeoServer blog and saw a new demo they had going to demonstrate their map annotations tools in development.

The map only has a base street map for NYC, but the annotation features and presentation is quite nice. You can add annotations and pictures to the map and all works very smoothly. The ability to create annotations and layer them on top of structured data like crime rates or toxic release points is very compelling. Then users can not only see where a statistical phenomenon is happening but also comment, including confirmation or criticism. For instance add a photo of dead fish in green bubbling ooze at a toxic release point.

We had some fun with the concept about a year ago after a trip to NYC mapping the location of bars and single women then testing out the hot spots. Less altruistic than the example above but again demonstrates the value of adding qualitative comments to quantitative data. For fun I added the heat map we made of the bars and singles to the GeoServer demo. If you go to the lower east side it is the yellow marker on 6th St.

Look forward to seeing if we can make use of the new GeoServer collaboration tools and props to them for all the good work.

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