Slashgeo

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.

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.

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.

A new Slashgeo user asked me a pertinent question about using Slashgeo to meet his needs, here's the answer! The question was if there is a way to receive the daily newsletter only for news regarding the 3D topic. The short answer is no. The daily newsletter, to which you can subscribe in your account prefs, shows all stories which go to Slashgeo's mainpage. Stories directly published to a section, usually less important, will not show up in the newsletter. However, you can see all stories for a topic by selecting the topic directly (link in top left menu) (here's the 3D topic). Ok, but that requires you to visit a page, so it's pull, not push. If you don't want to visit Slashgeo's website, alternatively, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of a specific section. Here's the main Slashgeo RSS feed (well, it's a GeoRSS feed :-), but there are specific RSS feeds for individual sections. Since the 3D topic is in the Technology section, this RSS feed will display only Technology related news. The main Slashgeo's sections are "Application domains", "Industry", "Reviews", "Technology" and so on. And finally, you can search for specific news using Slashgeo search capabilities, either the one at the bottom of the page or the Google Coop search box at top left of the page.

Confusing? A little I admit. We'll be looking to improve this in the coming months if Slashgeo survives. As an example, the Slash developers are experimenting with tags, which will eventually improve Slashgeo's navigation efficiency.

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!