Slashgeo

From the Baliz-Media web site, Tyler Mitchell the Executive Director of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) will be present in Quebec City (Quebec, Canada) in August 2008 at the 2nd International Workshop on Mobile Geospatial Augmented Reality. See this article in French for more details : http://media.baliz-geospatial.com/fr/communique-de-presse/tyler-mitchell-present-a-quebec-au-2eme-atelier-international-en-realite-augmentee-geospatiale-mobile

I'm happy to report about new supporter of the Slashgeo.org initiative: BALIZ Inc. BALIZ offers several services and amongst them, they provide excellent geospatial news coverage in French. This donation is especially welcomed since we're theoretically in slow-news mode with plans to be back at full speed next fall. Our open budget has been updated accordingly. Thanks!

I'm happy to report a new small donation by MapElves.com. Our Open Budget has been updated but they won't show up on Slashgeo's donors hall of fame because they asked me to merge their donation to the one of MapForums. Thank you MapElves! We're trying our best to provide a useful service and your participation (e.g. such as comments and submissions) is always welcomed. Not everyone appreciate the service though, constructive critics are also always welcomed.

Rather off-topic, if this may encourage you to contribute and participate in your own communities, I recently read an interesting Herbert Simon 6-pages text named Altruism and Economics. Here's an extract: "In evolutionary theory, altruism means behavior that reduces the actor's fitness while enhancing the fitness of others. If the total contribution of the altruist to the fitness of others is greater than the fitness lost by the altruist, altruism will increase the prospects of the group's surviving in competition with other groups."

Chris Spagnuolo writes "My partner in crime, Dave Bouwman, is currently running a survey called "What Do You Do? Geospatial Developer Survey" through May 9, 2008. I took a look at some of the preliminary results this evening and found some very interesting responses (some good...some not so good). Here the blurb on who should take this survey from Dave's blog:

Who should take the survey?
Anyone who writes any code that is geospatial in nature. From the Google Maps Mashup dudes, to those running some geoprocessing tasks with python. If you write code that has anything to do with a map, you're the perfect person to take the survey. Be sure to pass this url around to everyone you work with who is a geospatial developer — the more data points we get, the better. Who knows — we may even be able to influence the content at some conferences... So, if you haven't had a chance to take this yet, it's worth the few minutes it'll take to complete it. Here's the link (for copy pasting to all your developer buddies): http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=cugzupf5rAG_ 2bIu5WJ_2f7rxQ_3d_3d""

Our last poll asked our users about what you think you'll be doing at the end of your career. 39% of the 61 participants answered they'll be regularly working with geospatial technologies. 31% claimed they'll be rich and famous or jobless! (how should we interprete this?!) 9% will be managers. 17% is distributed over the other choices. Thanks to users redgeographics and ebwolf for sharing their world domination plans.

The new poll asks you about your relation with geospatial games. The "Related Stories" section of this last week story enumerates about 20 games with a significant geospatial component.

A small glitch prevented a significant amount of our 1,550 registered members to received the daily stories summary by email for last Friday, here it is. Friday coverage included many major geonews about Microsoft and Google amongst others. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I'm happy to report a new donation to Slashgeo.org, this time from MapForums.com. Slashgeo's revenues are entirely based on user donations. I updated our Open Budget accordingly.

It's been a while since we shared a Slashgeo tip of the day. There's two main ways to share comments on Slashgeo: (a) replying on the "root" of the story by selecting the "Reply" button on the right-hand side below the story summary, and (b) replying to a specific user comment by selecting the "Reply to This" link immediately after the said comment. Why is the distinction important? For several reasons and I'll give you two: (1) if you reply to another user's comment instead of the root, that user will receive a notification that you replied and will be able to share more experience, opinion and information, and (2), when replying directly to a user comment, the comments threads will stick together.

Related to the comment and story interactions mechanism, Slashdot now uses AJAX for the display and interaction with their story pages. Their code has not been pushed to Slashcode (Slashgeo's open source engine). One significant improvement to Slashgeo, in our long to-do list, will be using this AJAX code since is will circumvent the requirement to reload full html pages. Nobody likes waiting for pages to reload! :-) We can't however provide a deadline since this code implementation is mainly in their hands.

For your curiosity, despite theoretically being in slow geonews publishing mode and thanks to our expanding team of Slashgeo "editors", I'm happy to report we're now at 7,000 direct unique visitors daily, a number which slowly climbs. This is important since we're all volunteers here trying to provide a useful and ad-free tool for the geospatial community we're part of. Cheers!