Slashgeo

Last week several blogs started discussing the state of online exchanges occuring on the geospatial blogs. This subject is very dear to me and important to Slashgeo's future. How will online communications evolve within the geospatial community? Is Slashgeo pertinent and what role should it have? Are there too many geobloggers? Read more below for my opinion and personal analysis.

Slashgeo.org is at a crossroad. The new poll asks your feelings about the introduction of ads on Slashgeo's main page. The ads would be Google AdSense text-only ads. Why ads while I clearly said before I wanted Slashgeo to be ad-free? The administrators of the non-profit organization behind Slashgeo have no problem being a few thousands dollars in red, but despite regular efforts of attracting new members in the Slashgeo "editors" team, I'm mostly alone feeding the site. After nearly two years alive, the site is going well, with now about 20,000 daily hits (about 6,000 known unique daily users, 3.8M hits since launch) with however relatively little user participation (e.g. comments, submissions), and most important, providing users with 3-6 aggregated geospatial news daily. I know I'll have to significantly reduce my involvement next fall, jeopardizing Slashgeo's story feeding. Money, it seems, is the most effective incentive: if we can generate enough money with ads, this may allow us to pay someone to feed the site? Money has never been the center of this project, we want to serve the geospatial community, but we have come to wonder if money would help save the project itself. I find it awkward the solution to Slashgeo's manpower problem being serving ads, but we're welcoming any alternative suggestions you have. Having additional regular contributors would doubtlessly make the whole Slashgeo experience much more pleasant and beneficial to all.

The previous poll about breaking the Google Earth license at work it has been one of the least popular. Out of 51 votes, 29% do not look aware of the license at all, 19% said the license made them purchase the Pro or Enterprise version, 5% switched to NASA World Wind because of it and 28% are simply ignoring the license and breaking it.

I updated the poll to ask you what you think about the idea of OGC's standardization of Google's KML format, which was recently mentioned. The previous poll results about online geospatial news sources are interesting: 30% of those who answered claimed Slashgeo.org suits their needs with another 10% indicating PlanetGS, which includes Slashgeo stories, suits their needs. 40% of users say they use 2 or more sources (22% at 4+ sources) while 18% say they don't read any source regularly. 50 people who participated is a small sample out of the ~3000 single individuals who read Slashgeo daily. I'm surprised and happy to see some people like our selection of stories. This is where I believe Slashgeo has value: trying to aggregate the most pertinent geospatial news so you don't have to monitor 50 online sources as I do...

Stats don't matter. What matters is the geospatial community finding slashgeo.org useful. A little more than 9 month after launch, crossing the 1,000,000 hits mark tells us our efforts are not entirely meaningless :-) However, let's not over rejoice.. I annoyingly keep repeating to the Slashgeo Team that we have not reached the maturity we envisioned. By maturity I'm referring to the, hopefully growing, number of comments and user submittals. We must also thank many individuals within the geospatial community. Some people write great content worthed to be shared with slashgeo users. Read more below in order to get an overview of slashgeo's most meaningful stats.