Slashgeo

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.

All Points Blog runs a story on the upcoming street side imagery technology for Microsoft Goes Live. Service demo will be available a little later in the day.

Slashdot has a story on U.S. houses being massively photographed. Their summary: "Photographers from a Canadian company are going house to house, shooting pictures of every house in America, in hopes of building a giant database that can be sold to banks, insurance companies, and appraisal firms. While this activity is legal (as long as the photographers don't trespass on private property to get their shots), there are obviously concerns about security and privacy. Considering that an individual can be detained and questioned by the FBI for photographing a bridge in this country, why should this Canadian company get a free pass? Tinfoil hat aside, something seems very, very fishy here." From the Arizona Star article about the photographing of Tucson: "'The [handout given to people who complain] made it sound like they're doing it for law enforcement, when in reality they're doing it for sales and marketing,' said [a City Council aide], who received several calls about the company."

All Points Blog links to an article about camera data acquisition and their potential integration to virtual globe apps. From the article: "IMC has started an initiative to capture complete street-level views of 25 major U.S. cities. McGovern notes that they drive specially outfitted Volkswagens up and down all the streets, then fill in the gaps, like New York's Central Park, with backpack-mounted units. [...] "If they have New York City or Chicago captured, then it makes sense to make it available through Google Earth. That allows you to distribute it easily, and Google has hundreds of millions of users that you can spread the cost over."" See also related stories below.

Mentioned here previously, the NYTimes (via APB) runs an article EveryScape, another 3D street view candidate, which has some unique features: "Now, one company is planning 3-D-like tours of Cambridge, Mass., and other cities that not only venture down streets, but also inside some local businesses. Tourists to this virtual Cambridge will be able to click their way along a Brattle Street rendered in realistic detail, and move through the computer-generated interiors of dozens of nearby shops and institutions. [...] EveryScape (www.everyscape.com) in Waltham, Mass., will start virtual tours of streets and businesses in Cambridge and Lexington, Mass., in December, said Mok Oh, founder and chief technology officer. [...] Mike Liebhold, a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future, a research organization in Palo Alto, Calif., says EveryScape is entering a complex marketplace of mapping services that already has many established players, like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo." See also related stories below.

Ogle Earth introduces Earthmine, a street-level 3D webmapping tool which allow 3D user annotations. The video explains the concept effectively. From the TechCrunch article: "What this all means is that Earthmine’s system can keep track of the objects found in the real world and attribute information to each of them (a process known as “asset mapping”). The latitude, longitude, elevation, and other attributes of garbage cans, telephone posts, manholes, and trees can be recorded and tracked in a pseudo-3D virtualization system. The information can be exploited within Earthmine’s software or exported to GIS or CAD systems. Alternatively, the information stored in preexisting Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be brought into Earthmine." See also the numerous related stories below.

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!

Some good news. The new Slashgeo editors team is still small but large enough to try again. Give us a few days to organize things and you should be able to get your geospatial news from Slashgeo.org again. Join us if you think you can have fun and help make this rebirth a success. One of the new editors said what he like about Slashgeo is its neutrality, that it's not something-only oriented but covering everything geospatial. There's also a new poll on aggregation and content contributions, probably the last Slashgeo-oriented poll for a while. The previous poll asked about ads on Slashgeo. An overwhelming 83% of voters basically said yes, with another 9% saying they don't care. I'll wait until we find out if reviving the site with new collaborators is a success before spending efforts on the financial aspect. On this very issue, I'm glad to report two new donors (previous post on donations): first Ken Schmidt, president of Steel in the Air and Jeff Hoffmann, an enthusiastic Slashgeo user. I'll update our Open Budget accordingly. Now is still the best time to join the new team of Slashgeo editors and be part of a geospatial news website read by thousands of geospatial professionals :-)

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.

Slashdot discuss the Google announcement of their new Street View and Mapplets feature. Their summary: "Today at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference Google unveiled two new map features. An O'Reilly blogger describes Street View, which uses 360-degree street-level video from Immersive Media to enable neighborhood walk-throughs in (for now) a few selected areas. The other new feature is Mapplets, which let you embed Google Maps mashups in any Web page. Much more coverage is linked from TechMeme." The GEB covers the launch. Of course, you can read about it from the Official Google Lat Long Blog. See related stories below.