Slashgeo

Deron Ohlarik writes "AGI announces Insight3D — a .NET control that lets developers add 3D visualization to their aerospace and GIS applications. Based on AGI's time-tested, astrodynamically accurate STK 3D engine, Insight3D supports terrain, imagery, 3D models, satellite orbits, aircraft routes and more. Objects can be animated and also interacted with through picking and flexible camera control. Insight3D is free for development and non-commercial use. Visit Insight3D.com and our blog for more information."

A short note to let you know I'll be mostly away for the next two weeks. Other Slashgeo editors will cover geonews and you are always welcomed to submit geonews (that's how a community is suppose to work right? ;-). As usual, I will make sure any major geonews is mentioned on the site, even if it's two weeks later. I expect the site going back to full speed around July 6th. Thank you for your comprehension, cheers!

This post is not about geospatial news, but rather about Slashgeo.org's open source engine named Slashcode. I've been wanting to update our site to use Slashdot's AJAX code, but found myself not able to do so, partly because we don't have access to the code. The challenges are far bigger, as I explain below, than code access. Here's a copy of a post published in my Slashdot journal. You'll also find several reactions from other Slashcode users directly in the Slashcode-general mailing list archives. It matters to Slashgeo's future because I don't want us to be stucked and die out of technological obsolescence.

"Slashcode is dead, long live Slashcode?

The good news is Slashdot is still an interesting site to me, continues to evolve and is in active development. But the good news about Slashdot do not apply to Slashcode, Slashdot's open source engine. I'm the main manager of a small Slashcode-based website. Despite my enthusiasm, the truth is Slashcode is dead. It has been dead for quite some time and I wonder if it can be resurrected. How can Slashcode be dead? There is no community behind it anymore. There has been no official release since 2002, granted you can and should use the CVS tags, but it has not been updated with anything recent such as the AJAX code used on Slashdot for the last few years.

Rebuilding the community? Maybe, but enthusiasts quickly hit a wall. Slashcode's own main page is not up to date, there's a lot of missing information and my previous efforts at helping updating it got no answers from the site admins. How can you build a community when there's no way to learn who's in the boat with you? Ah! The mailing lists, of course! There are two main Slashcode mailing lists. On the Slashcode-general list, there was only 8 threads in 2008, 3 so far for 2009. For the Slashcode-development, it's worse: 2 posts since May 2007, both from our small team. You can ask questions, but you never know if someone will answer the phone.

A few years ago our small team developed a plugin that adds webmaps to stories and GeoRSS to the feed but failed to get much feedback from anyone. We're far from the community and the development workforce than, to name just one, the one behind Drupal, which has its own conference and 2000 developer accounts. Slashdot's responsibility? None directly, Slashcode is open source software, they rightfully have no obligation to contribute to a community.

Slashcode still has some attracting features and an excellent auto-moderation system. So, what's Slashcode future? I'm interested in the insights you have to share. I fear my own Slashsite will die out of technological obsolescence and that other Slashsites have no future. A Slashcode community won't spring out of the digital blue overnight, but it all has to start somewhere. Is it too late to try to build a vibrant Slashcode community"

Our last poll asking you about the Where 2.0 conference, gave the following results: out of 53 answers, 11% will be there, 41% would like to but can't, another 11% 'not this year', 24% no and 9% never! In other words, 52% will or want to go.

Our new poll, 100% inspired by All Points Blog new poll, asks you about whether your inclined to share your location through Internet technologies (think Google Latitude, MS GeoLife, Twitter, GeoRSS, etc).

I'm also happy to report a new donation to Slashgeo from Digital Vector Maps. It's getting harder and harder to be featured on Slashgeo's Top Donors list and have a link to your website on our main page (box on the right-hand side). Hopefully, even the smallest donations will be mentioned in our all-time contributors list. There are no ads here and we're supposed to pay the hosting bills via user donations. Thanks Digital Vector Maps!

Our last poll asked you about the impacts of the economic crisis on the geospatial industry. The results of of 47 votes: 42% say the economic crisis is bad for everyone, 8% claim geospatial won't be affected that much, but 21% are optimists and believe the economic crisis will actually be good for geospatial, 10% admit their ignorance and 17% don't see the economic crisis from where they stand. The new poll asks you about the upcoming O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference.

You might experience some problems accessing the site's subsections, sorry for the inconvenience. This will be fixed as soon as possible. Also, some of you may not have received yesterday's newsletter. Here's the 6 stories that were published.

I'm happy to report a new donation from Denver Internet Marketing, large enough to show up in our Top Donors list (right-hand side of our main page). Slashgeo.org partly survives because of such small donations. We don't run ads, you don't even need Adblock Plus or Safari AdBlock here. If you like the services we provide to you, such as manually selected geospatial news aggregation, please donate. Larger donations will grant you a link on our main page in the Top Donors box, however, I decided to provide a full list of financial contributors, to make sure even people who give small amounts to us will get minimal recognition. Even more important than money, is your participation. Thanks!