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Slashgeo's Site Closing or in Indefinite Hiatus. Thank you.
posted by Satri
on Tuesday July 03, @11:12AM
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from the So-long,-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish dept.
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from the So-long,-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish dept.
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
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
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slashgeo's Open Budget and Transparency
[+]
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$/day to maintain the website. slashgeo's added value should come from the aggregated news and from user comments: if you can divert some time to participate by sharing comments and submitting stories, please do so. It is more important than money to us. We shared some slashgeo.org statistics a few weeks ago - go see them if you missed it.
In short, it cost us about 2.50$/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.
Geospatial Blogs, Slashgeo's Future and Dilution 19 comments
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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.
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[+]
Some improvements to Slashgeo. Trackback pings can now be sent and received. Additionally, you can slashdot and digg stories with a simple click as much as adding a del.icio.us bookmark. As some of you might have noticed, our RSS feed is back to GeoRSS and Google Maps can be shown on a story's page. Not everything works flawlessly yet, but we're working on it. You can sure share your feature requests! I also update the main page poll to ask you about which main scale you work with. The previous poll about projects revealed most users have many projects (39%) and are missing time (18%) or funding (18%). Only 7% feel they work on the best geospatial projects. You might also expect few news items until Friday, since I'll be attending the Geomatics 2006 conference. Don't worry, we'll cover any significant story to make sure you didn't miss anything pertinent.
New Improved Search and Geospatial Blogs Search on Slashgeo
[+]
In our efforts to improve Slashgeo's experience, we added a new search in the left menu on the main page. This is not a minor improvement and here's why. First, there's a whole new searchbox: searching tens of manually selected geospatial blogs using Google's Custom Search. Second, the stock slashcode search has some serious limitations: (1) search words must have 4 letters or more, which is a serious problem if a user wants to search for GPS, KML, LBS or GML, etc., (2) some words are ommited at MySQL's level, such as 'where', so you could not search for the Where 2.0 conference and (3), the comments themselves are not searchable. The old search, at the bottom of the page, is still there for you to use it. It's not that obsolete since it offers some flexibility that the Google custom search does not provide. Another related tip: I often use the topics page to find items related to a specific topic. One last thing, text ads are shown on the custom search results page. Let's say this is experimentation and testing. The next poll will ask you, the Slashgeo users, what you think of this situation.
Poll on Ads to Save Slashgeo and GE License Poll Results 5 comments
[+]
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.
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.
Slashgeo's Call for Collaborators
[+]
Slashgeo has been providing aggregated geonews, and more, for thousands of daily readers during the last two years. In order to revive the site, here's the final call to collaborators. Thanks to the OSGeo mailing list, several people have already expressed their intentions to contribute regularly to feeding Slashgeo! :-) I'm not claiming victory yet, but if we gather a new team of 5 to 10 people, it will make involvement fun and not too time consuming for any single individual. Even if you have just 1 hour/week to spare for one or two aggregated stories, that's great. Read on below for more details, planning and suggestions. And while I have your attention, a few interesting geonews came out during the last two weeks (which I may catch up for our readers), including a great article on how Google Earth really works, Windows Vista support for ArcGIS 9.2, the release of GDAL/OGR 1.4.2 and this interesting introduction to a comparison of webmapping APIs.
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[+]
Let me share some comments on Slashgeo's comeback after a shorter than anticipated hiatus. I gain no personal benefice in managing Slashgeo, probably the opposite happens in fact! Many readers expressed their wish for seeing Slashgeo alive again and this is great :-) One condition to it was the building of a new team of editors to select and publish stories. How has it been going? It's a great start in my opinion, several new editors joined the team and have already published almost 30 stories together. Sincere thanks to these geospecial individuals! I'll be mostly away from the computer by the end of the year: since I suspect it may require months to assemble a new solid and autonomous team, it's not impossible Slashgeo's revival will fail. I'll try my best to avoid this.
Criticism, such as Datum Shift's recent comments about Slashgeo over a story published by a new editor, which triggered this status report, is relevant. We are listening to constructive criticism and we are trying our best to improve the site with the little resources we have. Anyone wanting to help improve the service and its quality is welcomed to join! At the moment, I tend to believe we have thousands of daily readers for mainly one reason: manually selected and aggregated geonews. This is what we'll continue to provide to the best of our abilities while hoping Slashgeo will eventually become something of greater usefulness to the geospatial community.
Slashgeo Two Years Anniversary
[+]
I am happy to announce today is Slashgeo's second anniversary :-) These two years have been filled with many great satisfying moments and challenges. The third year will probably help us find out what will be the long term fate of the project. I think we've been doing great. About 2,300 stories have been published, over 4,724,000 hits have been registered, at an average rate of about 12,000 daily hits, reaching a few thousands individual geoprofessionals every day. There are over 1,300 registered members which shared over 1,700 comments (I have a large share of these ;-). As you're probably already aware, Slashgeo is managed by a non-profit organization and we're transparent. We have no revenue other than the donations we received from MapJack.com, Steel in the Air and Jeff Hoffmann. We want to provide a great tool to the geospatial community by the geospatial community. There are many ways to contribute yourself as a member of this community such as by sharing comments and opinions and by submitting pertinent geonews.
The Slashgeo project died in early July, just to be quickly revived by popular demand and the influx of nice new editors and volunteers. My recent accident, for which I am still to recover, demonstrated how the new editors are an asset to the Slashgeo community. Thanks! :-) We need more serious editors, contributing can be fun and rewarding. Plenty of improvements to Slashgeo have been envisioned, but lack of resources make them slow to implement at the moment. We hope this will change in the near future.
Slashgeo.org will continue to do its best to aggregate the most pertinent geospatial news from 50+ sources and offer a platform for discussion amongst geospatial professionals and enthusiasts. I sincerely hope you like the service we provide and hope you'll share your geopassion around!
The Slashgeo project died in early July, just to be quickly revived by popular demand and the influx of nice new editors and volunteers. My recent accident, for which I am still to recover, demonstrated how the new editors are an asset to the Slashgeo community. Thanks! :-) We need more serious editors, contributing can be fun and rewarding. Plenty of improvements to Slashgeo have been envisioned, but lack of resources make them slow to implement at the moment. We hope this will change in the near future.
Slashgeo.org will continue to do its best to aggregate the most pertinent geospatial news from 50+ sources and offer a platform for discussion amongst geospatial professionals and enthusiasts. I sincerely hope you like the service we provide and hope you'll share your geopassion around!
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Slashgeo's Site Closing or in Indefinite Hiatus. Thank you.
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Say It Ain't So!
(Score:0)It will be sad to see it go, thank you so much for all the hard work that you've put into it!
- DR, Morgantown WV, US
Sorry to see you go
(Score:0)Google's Ridiculous AdSense Policy
(Score:0)In many ways the process set-up is much like what the detainees at Guantanamo get -- no access to the evidence that you're accused of (that's a trade secret, don't you know!) and little-to no process for protesting your innocence. You're labeled a click-fraudster (enemy combatant) and are not to be trusted. Any subsequent correspondences will go unanswered, and you'll be lucky if a real person actually reviews your appeal.
IMHO, this type of behavior will only become more common and will invite government regulation from the FTC, or allow competitors to flourish from everyone they banned. Nice flexible corporate policy Google has there! Remember "evil" is defined only as what Sergey and Larry consider "evil". If there are any Google employees reading -- DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, instead of waiting for the inevitable class action lawsuit.
Sorry to hear this happened to someone with a genuinely good site. Thanks for the geospatial blogging you provided and good luck on your future endeavors.
Re:Google's Ridiculous AdSense Policy
(Score:3)I'm actually curious about this. The sites that I have adsense on, I've never had a problem with. However, they are all (unfortunately) very low traffic. How are people able to get a site banned from adsense itself? That seems ridiculous. Google's supposed to be the ad-servering-guru. One would think they could figure out who's truly gaming it and who's not. Anyone have specific info as to how this is done?
Re:Google's Ridiculous AdSense Policy
(Score:3)( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @04:07PM )
I don't know the specifics. I know that I received an email from Google saying there was fraudulous clicks on my Google Coop Search account and that they terminated my account. I filled a form on Google's AdSense blog and provided some more information, but the reply I got said after reconsideration, there really was fraudulous clicks and that my account will stay closed (forever?). Google provided no information at all and their FAQ stipulates they won't themselves block certain IP addresses. I asked them if they could share the faulty IP addresses so that I can block them at the source, but I received no news from Google (and doubt I ever will). As I said, this was the final blow. Maybe I would have kept feeding the site for a few weeks/months, but what I really wanted/want is collaborators. The money incentive could have brought collaborators, I just started too late? My error.
And to reply to your personal email you sent me, I totally agree: geospatial technologies are a big deal and it's exploding everywhere (pun intended
Re:Google's Ridiculous AdSense Policy
(Score:3, Interesting)I wish they'd give IP's. It would be real interesting to see where the clicks were coming from - and whether or not there were any referrer(s) that were bringing those visitors.
Anyway, from what I read, it really doesn't take squat to get a site into hot-water with adsense. Just click a little too much and ding! you're labelled.
Thank you.
(Score:0)Re:Thank you.
(Score:3)Thanks Alex
(Score:1)Thanks
(Score:1)Thanks...
(Score:0)Best of luck to you...
(Score:0)Best of luck to you, I hope the future smiles a little more kindly on you in your endeavors.
Best Regards,
Dave Smith
http://surveying-mapping-gis.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
Sad to hear it!
(Score:1)( http://www.tntech.edu/earth )
Thanks
(Score:0)Me Too Comment
(Score:0)Now that it is closing indefinitely, are there any other sites out there which fill this same nitch? What are quality sites which aggregate geospatial news?
thanks for the good times
(Score:1)Welcome to Life 2.0
(Score:1)( http://spatialguru.com/ )
I too will miss your reports - hopefully some others will volunteer to take it up... Thank you for the hard work!
I'm sad to see you had to make this choice, but at the same time I am really happy for you. As one who has had to choose many times between work, community and personal life myself, I know you are in for some good times
Sincerely,
Tyler
Buy my book: Web Mapping Illustrated [oreilly.com]
Sorry
(Score:0)Leszek Pawlowicz
http://freegeographytools.com/ [freegeographytools.com]
So long and thanks for all the fish
(Score:1)Sad news
(Score:2)( http://www.redgeographics.com/ )
Hans van der Maarel
Surprised! (in a bad way)
(Score:0)Many Thanks
(Score:0)Great, great work!!!
(Score:0)Félicitation Alex pour ce travail remarquable. Sans être un membre un règle, j'ai été ces deux dernières années un lecteur assidu de Slashgeo et j'en ai fait la promotion active à tous mes collègues et amis qui œuvrent en géomatique.
J-F chez Hélimax
So sorry
(Score:1)Sorry to hear about this
(Score:0)I'm sorry to hear about this. I am able to understand you, the countless hours of hard work to get a web site running... I do this to a much smaller extent.
It's a pity since I held a speech just days ago at a local conference, and I talked about WebGIS... and then I pointed audience to Slashgeo for News!
I think - pardon me - you are giving up just a little inch before critical mass takes on...
But OK, take a break, you need it. It's not really over, this will give a good shake at other people. You know, I wish you good luck. I think people *are* generous and I'm pretty sure you will find volunteers to keep things going, to keep the site up!
About AdSense: yes I know, yes it's all sad and true and frustrating, apparently someone *can* terminate your account with too many clicks. I heard that many times. It could be legend but! But they should be so many from a single IP. It must be done on purpose!
It's doubly sad because maybe that someone just wanted to help you.
(When I visit a site that I really like, I always do *one* click on AdSense ads, if they are there.
People tend to ignore ads, that's all in the game... But I am conscious that I can help you out with you site just by clicking one of your ads. Just one mind you!
Anyway, should you decide to go on with Slashgeo, the solution is there... Go for AdBrite, or many other competitors. They are good and the net result may be higher.
I wish you the best! Good luck, I regard you very higly! Now concentrate about your family and the great news of your baby!
W.
It's a shame
(Score:0)It's indeed sad to hear about this. Slashgeo is/was my #1 spatial news site. In fact, it is bookmarked between Slashdot and The Register at the top of my news folder. Although I would sometimes see a story on one of those, or another spatial blog, usually you were on top of it already - quite amazing I think. Many stories that you ran I never noticed anyplace else. You really did a great job.
I have read the calls for help and frankly, if I didn't have three kids myself, I would have answered. Maybe I should have anyway, but I don't like to commit to something I may not be able to pull off. Time seems to be something that is always in short supply around here (which you will really understand soon - congratulations). I'm sure there are many talented people out there who could collectively manage this site. Why no-one will "answer the call", I don't know. Maybe spatial stuff is no longer leading edge enough to get the geeks like I was in my teens and twenty's when we spent many hours running BBS's and computer clubs.
Thanks for all the work you did for this site...
Bryan
subscribers
(Score:1)Re:subscribers
(Score:3)( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @04:07PM )
My first challenge is building a solid new team behind Slashgeo. I'm not sure if I will succeed, but I will try my best
Cheers!
Bummer
(Score:1)regards,
Hamish Bowman
Alternatives?
(Score:1)( http://www.canoe42.ca/ )
Could we reinterpret this to be a polite threat or call to action?
Would anyone be willing to take the helm in Satri's absence?
Thanks Alex
(Score:1)( http://www.geonames.org/ )
I wish you and your family all the best. They certainly deserve your time and attention more than we do. Good luck to all three of you.
Marc Wick
GeoNames.org
say it ain't so
(Score:1)