As he mentioned this morning on Twitter, Tim “Chippy” Waters is coming onboard to bring some serious psychogeography and new geospatial capabilities to GeoCommons.

Tim has many accomplishments, from Geocodr, the first geocoder based on Flickr photo tags that let you search for “happiness in New York” (map), even before you could download the shapefiles – to his more recent and well known efforts in building MapWarper in use by the New York Public Library for georectifying and sharing out their historic map archives.

In addition, Tim was responsible for the first uploads of the Haitian GIS data from CNIGS almost one year to the day before the earthquake this past January. He stood up a MapWarper specifically for relief efforts as thousands of volunteers around the world rectified and traced historics maps of Haiti from the 1990′s. He has also been an active member of OpenStreetMap, including hosting worldwide mapping parties.

We’re excited to have Tim joining the FortiusOne team – and definitely expect to see some great new geospatial features from him in GeoCommons in the very near future.

Popularity: 2% [?]

This week I’m off to Camp Roberts again for this quarter’s RELIEF exercise.  FortiusOne has been participating for the past year or so in RELIEF, which is a crisis response integration exercise.  Essentially different groups get together to hack on things and make them work together.

The first of these exercises that FortiusOne participated in was last August, but only remotely.  That was the start of our involvement running an offline geo-stack for humanitarian relief.  Since then Todd Huffman has taken the prototype to Afghanistan and the tools worked on at that exercise have continued to be developed.  Of course these events have been minor compared to the effect of the earthquake in Haiti.  The importance of collaboration in crisis response has been long stated as a necessity, but Haiti really showed how powerful it could be.

One really minor feature I’m really excited about t is no longer using subdomains in our Mac Mini deployments.  This means that if the offline instance URL is http://geoiq.local for example there is not extra configuration to access Finder and Maker.  Previously the URLs looked like http://finder.geoiq.local and http://maker.geoiq.local, in the absence of DNS this necessitated adding 3 hostfile entries.  Now the URLs look like http://geoiq.local/finder and http://geoiq.local/maker for example.  This means just an IP address can be used or a single hostfile entry is required.

One addition to RELIEF that I want to work with is Stewart Long and his balloon photography.  Two weeks ago at WhereCampSoCal he made this photo using an inexpensive camera and a weather balloon, then careful stitching.  After processing imagery this week I plan to tile the imagery and put it into the offline GeoIQ instance I built and derive vector data within an OpenStreetMap instance set-up for the exercise.  Working through the whole process is important to work out integrations before there is a crisis.  Look for more updates throughout the week, I promise to not get so consumed by the hacking and collaboration that I forget to post.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Yesterday, the Huffington Post posted a short article on its front page titled “How the Economic Impact of the Oil Spill is Spreading Beyond the Gulf.” This article featured an embed of a map created in GeoCommons showing the BP oil spill, fishery closure boundaries, as well as the cities impacted. The HuffPost plans to update this map with user input to track how communities across the country continue to be impacted. This is an ideal example of how FortiusOne’s GeoCommons can be used to create a map to make it easy for readers to visualize information in an interactive and accessible way. Other online news media have also used GeoCommons to enhance their story. Check out The Toronto Star and The Digital Gazette for some other examples.

Want to embed maps in your own blog? GeoCommons makes it easy to do.

View your map in Maker! and click on the “Details” button in the upper right. In the Map Details window that opens, click on the gray box that says “Embed this map in your website”.

Copy all the text in the box, and paste it directly into your blog post or web page. If you are using a blog tool like WordPress, you will want to copy the code into the HTML tab.

Preview your post, and you should see your map displayed!

By default the map is 400 pixels high. You can modify this default height and width by changing the numbers in the <style> section of the embed code. For example, to set the height to 300 pixels and the width to 500 pixels, modify the values to height: 300px; width: 500px.

Here is the Huffington Post’s map embedded by simply copying and pasting the embed code:

View full map

Have you embedded a GeoCommons map in your blog? Share it with us by commenting below!

Popularity: 5% [?]

This weekend I’m off to San Diego for WhereCampSoCal. WhereCamps are a version of barcamps or unconferences specifically around geospatial topics. An unconference is an event where the agenda is determined in an ad-hoc fashion by the attendees. This is usually done the day of the event utilizing a grid scheduling system sometimes referred to as “the board.” There are slight variations on how the board is created, but usually people write ideas on a piece of paper and then announce them to the group and place the topic on the grid. Sometimes similar topics are combined but that is up to the proposers of each topic. Usually people are fairly agreeable to joining forcing to run sessions.

The one thing that is atypical of this WhereCamp is that it is not entirely an unconference. The first day there are scheduled sessions and keynotes. Friend of FortiusOne, Todd Huffman is keynoting as well as Eric Frost from San Diego State University Viz Center. I’ll be giving two workshops, the first on using GeoCommons to share data and make custom maps. The second workshop is on how to edit in OpenStreetMap. There are also going to be workshops from SimpleGeo, ESRI and Urban Mapping. While the structured portion of the event is going on during the day Saturday there will also be unconference sessions. Sunday sessions are all ad-hoc and will be proposed the day of the event. I hope to participate in a session on geolocative games, which is one of my favorite topics at most WhereCamps. Some people from Grassroots Mapping will be around, so I hope to help fly some kites and balloons to take aerial photography as well.

Since WhereCamps are usually free to the attendees I was excited that FortiusOne was able to sponsor the event. Without sponsors it would be impossible to keep these events free. The cost of running an ad-hoc event is relatively cheap, but there are still expenses for food and office materials to make the grid for example.

Registration is still open for WhereCampSoCal up until almost the start of the event. So if this sounds fun to you sign-up and I’ll see you there!

Popularity: 4% [?]