Slashgeo

Today we offer you content and want feedback! Here's a presentation I made about SlashGISRS.org and the state of online medias within the geospatial community [look under files]. Read more below for the context, outcome and possible future. A lot of slashgisrs.org readers are community enthusiasts which also have their own blogs or at least have an opinion about blogging in the geospatial community. What do you think? As a starting point, some SlashGISRS challenges I identify in the presentation [pdf, 5.2Mb] are: "(a) Main challenge: in order to be special and worthed, slashgisrs.org must gather a critical mass of users to foster discussion, (b) act as a discussion aggregator: right now, insightful comments are scattered between numerous websites and (c) stimulate a sense of community: become a place for social exchanges and even friends making"

Today slashgeo.org takes another step towards openness and transparency. We are providing our financial report to anyone interested as a demonstration of our willingness to be a truly open and a community-driven tool.

In short, it cost us about 2.50$/day to maintain the website. slashgeo's added value should come from the aggregated news and from user comments: if you can divert some time to participate by sharing comments and submitting stories, please do so. It is more important than money to us. We shared some slashgeo.org statistics a few weeks ago - go see them if you missed it.

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.

SlashGISRS, which was renamed Slashgeo, was launched one year ago! :-) There are so many geospatial news sources, I feel Slashgeo's offer of aggregated news is useful. As for its usefulness as a discussion platform, the future will tell us :-) My curiosity in regards to what's to come is whether Slashgeo will stay a tool useful to some, or become a tool useful to many. After over 1250 published stories and over 1000 comments from anonymous visitors and about 730 registered members, I plan to continue feeding the site regularly, even if there will be some slower weeks when I'm away from my office (such as last week and last April-May). Anyone willing to contribute is more than welcomed! Our values include communication, openness and transparency. I have learned *a lot* in the process and I believe it's true also for the other founding members. We will continue to improve the site and many interesting features which will augment the information architecture of Slashgeo are in the works and should be released in the coming months. Hope you enjoy the tool! :-)

It's been a while since I haven't provided an update on Slashgeo. Let me take the recent breaking of 1000 registered members to share some thoughts. As I recently wrote about today's usefulness: "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." Launched a year and a half ago, Slashgeo now has about 3000 known unique readers daily, slowly going higher. The number of stories published generally varies between three and five every week day. There's plenty of exciting improvements I'd like to add to Slashgeo (such as completing the temporary GeoRSS map). But I have difficulties keeping the pace at feeding the site with pertinent stories, that's why I annoyingly regularly invite anyone interested to join our small team :-) Sharing stories from time to time is of course welcomed. I must admit that I'm not untouched by the occasional hate-mail I receive for running Slashgeo, but since there are much more encouraging mails coming in, I'm filled with enthusiasm! My dream is simple: I hope one day the site will sustain itself by having numerous people behind it and that the geospatial community will contribute and transform it into an even more valuable geospatial portal :-)

You got that right. The best interpretation of this post's title is that the Slashgeo.org project has come to an end. Or at least in serious hiatus until the context significantly evolves. Over the last two years, Slashgeo has been a source of enjoyment and stress. As much as it has been fun, it slowly became more of a responsibility then a rewarding project. Here's some explanations and personal thoughts on the adventure.

Why?
In one word, manpower. In the beginning, there was four enthusiasts behind the Slashgeo idea, we hoped additional geospatial enthusiasts would join the bandwagon, but almost right after launch two years ago, I ended up alone. I am not bitter at all, it just reminds me not to have too many expectations since life always succeeds in surprising me. I spent over a thousand hours on the project, but that was not enough to improve the site at the pace I would have liked. I decided spending 1 to 3 hours extra work on a daily basis, early in the mornings, evenings and sometimes weekends, is not as fun as it used to be. My wife and I are expecting our first baby at the year's end (yes, this is great news :-), so I don't believe my available free time will stay at actual levels. I feel to adequately manage, improve and feed Slashgeo and live a balanced life, I'd have to choose between my actual professional geospatial job that I like and a life as a professional geoblogger and consultant. Where I failed? Despite my efforts and numerous invitations, I have failed to gather a team around me to share the administrative and geonews aggregation work. My enthusiasm failed to attract fellow geoprofessionals to drink the Slashgeo Kool-Aid. The site is useful to thousands of readers but has become somewhat detrimental to my self. Unlike other geoblogs, Slashgeo requires constant attention otherwise is would not be a reliable geonews aggregator.

The coup de grâce
What was the final blow? It came when Google terminated my AdSense account last week claiming there was fraudulous clicks on the website. I even haven't got the chance to try AdSense on Slashgeo, only in the Google Coop search, but someone in the Internet succeeded in closing my account with fraudulous clicks. I communicated with Google and they confirmed my account is irremediably closed with no appeal and no additional information. This shocked me. When you think of it, I could of course try to solve this issue, or use another advertiser such as Yahoo! or Microsoft, but this would not necessarily help: I need manpower, not money. Of course, as I indicated, money could allow paying someone to feed the site, but this would mean substantially more administrative efforts.

Money
I engulfed 2,500$ of my personal money in this adventure. This is not a problem even if I was hoping for long term breakeven. I even initially though I could live out of the site, something a few other geobloggers actually succeed, but I'm not ready to leave my real job to find out how good I could do. Is this cowardice? I don't think so. It's just I have other challenges that seem more interesting. I wasn't specifically looking for money, but not fame or glory either (though it could not hurt? ;-). I kept my personal name and professional activities mostly away from Slashgeo because I wanted the community to concentrate on the tool, not the ones behind the tool. Maybe this was another mistake.

As of today, I still believe that a tool such as Slashgeo, which uses the open source Slash CMS, is the best long term tool for the geospatial community (see arguments here). Slash is quickly improving as a CMS (the main developers is the Slashdot crew), we even added Google Maps/OpenLayers and GeoRSS support for Slash, though these plugins should be considered still in development.

Is Slashgeo irrevocably closed?
No. I know the future is never like I imagine and ever full of surprises. That's why I included "indefinite hiatus" in the title. If a group of two or more serious enthousiasts are up to the task to help feed and manage the site, even with ads, I'll gladly hand them the site and contribute to its "rebirth".

How was Slashgeo doing?
It was doing good in my opinion. 2,079 news items have been posted along with 1,549 user comments (though I'm responsible for a large number of these comments). There is 1,185 registered members to Slashgeo. There is now around 20,000 daily hits to Slashgeo, including about 6,000 known unique IP addresses. That's not bad at all and these numbers are going up every month. A total of 3,9 million hits have been recorded since September 2005 (much more if I believed Apache instead of Slash). Several friends claim these stats say our readership worths gold in advertizing opportunities. Maybe, but as I said, this was not about money. I admit this was probably another mistake on my part. Note that more user comments would not reduce the burden of feeding the site with aggregated stories, but sure would have meant the tool is closer to its original goal. Slashgeo never reached the mythic critical mass of users to attract regular user comments and excitement.



I do understand the service we provided was not for the geobloggers community, since most of these bloggers already keep themselves aware of major geonews out there. However, I still believe Slashgeo provided a unique service. PlanetGS is a great tool, but the high frequency content update, signal/noise ratio and duplication of stories might not suit the regular geoprofessional.

Was it worthed?
If you wonder, this wasn't an easy decision. Tears were dropped. But I guess this is for the greater good, especially my greater good! ;-) Is this a failure? Yes and no. Was it worthed? I think so. I learned *a lot*, even if sometimes, the hard way. I even learned to deal with the occasional hate mail which was hopefully compensated by sporadic encouraging words from Slashgeo users. To tell you the truth, I took the decision four days ago and it already feels like the best favor I could do to myself :-)

So, what's next?
My friends know how involved I am within my various communities. I will of course continue my contributions to the geospatial community that I love. But I will now contribute at my own rhythm. Hey, I might even now share more often real content instead of linking to other people's content! :-)


Finally, I'd like to thank my wife Caroline. She supported me during those two years and allowed my many extras hours in front of the computer screen. She even contributed herself directly in drawing the custom topics icons. Another sincere thank to Shane of Lottadot, who hosted Slashgeo for a ridiculous fee, developed quite a few additions at my request and helped me find my way in the geekish slash administration system. A final thank to our readers, to all who supported me and contributed to the site.

Alex