Slashgeo

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

It's my pleasure to announce that NAVTEQ Network for Developers(TM) (NN4D), introduced a year ago, is an active supporter of Slashgeo.org. This is great news for our thousands of geospatial professional readers. It opens the door to the sharing of additional pertinent content from NAVTEQ and will increase Slashgeo's visibility. We are also planning a few new related features which may interest several of our readers. No money is involved in the deal and rest reassured that Slashgeo will stay neutral and continue aggregating and discussing geonews from the geospatial community as a whole.

New on the Slashgeo's main page is the Donation slashbox on the right side which will display the Slashgeo Top Donors and provide a link to the donor's website of choice. This is somehow a call for donations. Slashgeo.org, run by a registered non profit organization, is read by thousands of readers every day and has no other source of revenue at the moment. Ads may eventually come to alleviate the costs to run the site (here's our open budget), but of course, what weights more in the balance are the countless hours spent to read several geonews sources and feed the site with the best possible aggregated geonews. It's really up to you to donate or not, but be reassured that it will be appreciated :-) 5$ or less is fine and better than nothing ;-) A friend told me Slashgeo's pagerank was good enough that links on our site would help attract visitors to linked sites, that's why I'm happy to provide a link within this slashbox to our top donors. Of course, there's plenty of other means to contribute such as sharing your opinion in the comments and submitting stories to publish. Cheers! Alex

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!

Dear readers, a small note to let you know Slashgeo geonews coverage should go back to full speed in the coming days/weeks. I was going to give a talk at a conference in San Diego this week, but a motorcycle accident last Friday modified the plans. I am very satisfied to find out many of the new Slashgeo editors, namely Colin, Lennox, Gene and Dan, took the opportunity to publish geonews in my absence. Thanks :-) That's how I hope Slashgeo will become, a site ran by the geospatial community for the geospatial community. I think we're in the right direction.

I won't provide much details on the accident itself because you're here to read about geonews, not my personal life. In short, I was extremely lucky, no permanent damage to my body (or my mind! ;-). Despite the title of this article, I was going slow (about 50km/h). After a few flips in the air, I ended up with four broken ribs, a fractured clavicle, a scapula in pieces and a lacerated spleen. Now back at home from the hospital, I expect it will require at least a few days before I resume contributing and feeding our readers with the regular geonews you've been used to. And I'm happy to confirm this recent dangerous experience has not reduced my will to spend precious time aggregating geonews for our community. It still makes me feel somehow useful. Cheers! Alex

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.

The previous poll asked our users if they would contribute to Slashgeo probably gave unreliable results. Out of 46 people, 17% said they're all in, which makes sense because the poll followed the call for collaborators, 17% said they'll submit stories from time to time, 17% said they'll contribute through comments, 32% may eventually contribute while 14% just don't have the time or the will. The new poll asks you about who is doing geospatial work at your office. This poll is directly related to this story about certified geoprofessionals and the problem of low availability of geospatial professionals.

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 :-)

Slashdot discuss a TechConsumer entry claiming, to no surprise to geospatial professionals, that the future of Web 2.0 is location awareness. From the entry: "Mobile devices have begun to allow us to take this information with us, but we are still stuck in an old paradigm. If I am standing in the Madrid, Spain train station, there is a good chance I want to ride a train somewhere. But when I connect to the Internet on my mobile device, I’m stuck finding information the old way: through keywords. Somewhere out there is information that would help me, but all I have our my not-as-useful keywords. The next big thing is to organize, tag, and link information to a specific location."

And to my surprise, enough people said they'll contribute as Slashgeo editors to make it worth trying a second beginning. Great! We'll spend the next few days (or more) to organize ourselves as a new team. Anybody with passion and some time is welcomed.

Stay tuned, we'll soon publish our "final call for collaborators" post. Some people have already expressed their intention to become "editors" and contribute feeding the site, exciting! Meanwhile, remember our open budget? I am happy to announce our first donor: MapJack.com. Their financial contribution of 300$ will help pay for hosting our servers. I have been clear: it is very important for Slashgeo, in order to stay reliable, to be product-neutral. I don't want to be or appear corrupted, my integrity worths more than a few thousand dollars (but don't try with millions ;-). Since MapJack offered support even during Slashgeo's hiatus and knowing the site might not go live again, here's some more about them: they offer a street-view mapping for San Francisco and you can read their recent press release below.