India wants to ban Google Earth and Wikimapia. The aftermath of the Mumbai attacks created a petition to remove all imagery of India on Google Earth and similar sites like Wikimapia. Mumbai-based lawyer Amit Karkhanis filed the petition saying, “The petition is filed against the backdrop of terror attacks in Mumbai. Even images of nuclear plants and defense establishments are available on this site. It is a security hazard.”

Vector One’s Jeff Thurston discusses the representation part to his GIS series. He says that representation part is an integral feature and one of the primary functional capabilities of GIS. Thurston discusses the many ways GIS is represented, including tabulated spreadsheets, numerically instead of graphically, through maps, charts, etc. He also talks about visualization tools that ‘take GIS data output and use it to develop other forms of visualization.’

The Washington Post released a flashed based Google Map mashup called TimeSpace: World. The map is a compilation of world news from the newspaper, its online site – washingtonpost.com, PostGlobal, Foreign Policy magazine and other partner sites including The Associated Press. The coverage is represented by clusters around hot-spots on the map. Each cluster lets you view articles, blog posts, photos, videos and even reporter twitter feeds.

Microsoft Research India created a system called the Robust Location Search, which enables location addresses in structured formats from any country. Microsoft plans to add it into Window Live Local.

The unemployment is getting worse. “Initial jobless claims surged by 58,000 to 573,000 in the week ending Dec. 6, the highest level since 1982.” MSNBC created an interactive map that displays the unemployment rate by month for each state starting in September 2007.

Blogger added geotagging! Now the Blogger community can geotag blog entries and not just photo. Now feed readers, map applications and search engines can associate posts with their locations.

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With the college football season winding down and the National Championship coming up on January 8, 2009 between the Florida Gators and the Oklahoma Sooners, it would be interesting to know what college programs across the country are paying their head coaches. The following map shows a data collection, by all co-educational post-secondary institutions that receive Title IV funding. That basically means all colleges that participate in financial student aid programs that also offer athletic programs. The points represent colleges and what male head coaches are paid per university.

Click Finder! to view the dataset.

After viewing this above map, I was interested in finding out what the BCS top 25 college football team rankings and their head coaches were getting paid – comparatively to the other head coaches throughout the US. The map below shows the top 25 college football teams with orange proportion symbols and reveal, for the most part, that most of the colleges with highly paid coaches are universities that are succeeding at the highest level. The University of Texas, University of Florida, and University of Alabama show particularly high salaries.

Click Finder! to view the dataset

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With the news hitting the papers today that the Big Three are going to get a $15 Billion bailout - I had to ask the question does the GeoWeb need a bailout? Detroit has a broken business model and the GeoWeb needs a business model, so I figure we are in similar circumstances.

Joking aside I’m curious how various GeoWeb companies have been feeling the economic crunch. I’ve been waiting for the shoe to drop on our sales pipeline, but surprisingly we’ve only had one prospect put a deal on hold because of the economic climate. Are other start ups seeing similar trends or have we just been lucky thus far? I doubt we’ll get much insight, but does anyone have scoop on our Big Three (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft)? The few cuts at Google have been widely publicized - especially the shuttering of their virtual world - Lively. Yahoo! has been making cuts for a while, but recently announced laying off an additional 2,000 employees. Microsoft has been laying off in much smaller numbers - most recently removing 40 employees from recently acquired aQuantive? None of this is GeoWeb specific, and I am very curious if anyone has scoop along those lines. I’d have to guess there is a much bigger focus on revenue generation, and building community and eyeballs has decreased as a priority.

So is it sink or swim time for the GeoWeb? Find a business model or go home? Will this result in consolidation in the market place? More start ups turning to government dollars to keep the lights on? Will all the government bailout funding to broken business models (financial and manufacturing) mean a down turn in innovation? Capital markets have dried up, VC’s are skiddish, many customer budgets are frozen, and no bailouts for SMB’s or start ups etc. etc. Or does this mean leaner start ups focused on revenue generating products “that matter“?

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In January, a record 4 million people are expected to gather in Washington, DC to take part in the Inauguration celebration. Hotels near the area sold out nearly the day after Obama was elected. Luckily, where traditional lodging failed, Craigslist saved the day. People all around Washington, DC (and I mean all around, including from places like Baltimore which is nearly 40 miles away) have been so kind as to offer up their couches, rooms, whole houses, and even offices to those in need of a place to stay for the event. That is, if you are willing to sell your first born child!

Prices for a room are ranging from $50 per night to above $4,000. It is quite common to see rooms rented for an average of $2,000 per night. In fact hundreds of DC entrepreneurs a day are jumping for the opportunity to make their month’s rent in one night of sleeping on a friend’s couch so they can rent their apartment. While the prices are often unbelievable, many offers include breakfast, a ride to the metro, and even babysitting.

We thought it would be interesting to see where these people’s room/homes were, if they were actually located anywhere near to the inauguration site (or DC for that matter) and how much they were charging based on their location.

We took a 3 day sample of ads from Craigslist, geo-coded them and then added some attributes based on prices and amenities. You can find this dataset in Finder!.

This first map shows the entire DC metro area and beyond to demonstrate the distribution of rooms for rent.

The next two maps show the DC area with rooms based on price per room, per night, as well as metro stops. It seems like there is very little relationship between the location of the room and the price. Go figure!

So if you are still looking for a place to stay, or if you want to check out how much you can get away with charging for your floor and a sleeping bag, check out this dataset in Maker!.

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Vector One’s Jeff Thurston wrote two posts focusing on the systems and monitoring parts of GIS. Thurston says the systems aspect of GIS is the ‘most interesting’ because of the integration of information. He also expressed that the relationship between GIS and other technologies requires monitoring due to the constant changes in technology.

Online publication Geospatial Solutions launched a new e-newsletter, Trailblazer. Intended for executives and other decision makers, Trailblazer uses an assortment of media (articles, interviews, tutorials, etc.) to explain the benefits and pitfalls of geospatial technology.

Researching data, especially for mapping, just got easy. Amazon launched their public data sets yesterday. ‘The project encourages developers, researchers, universities and business to upload large (non-confidential) data sets to Amazon and let others integrate that data into their own AWS applications.’ What use to take an extreme amount of time to gather data, can now be accessed within a minutes. The data is hosted for free.

Good news Mac Users! Google Earth released their plugin for Mac OS X. The new plugin should result in more ‘widespread support of the plug in for some serious applications.’

VerySpatial called GIS Pathway.com a ‘Learning Solutions Blog”. Run by a student (Timothy) at Central Piedmont Community College in NC, the site offers tips on using ArcGIS. VerySpatial recommends the site for its descriptions and “smattering videos.” They even say it’s a great model for the NGTC to review.

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