Slashgeo

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.

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 :-)

All Points Blog links to an article about certified GIS professionals making more money than the not certified ones. From the article: " "I get calls from big organizations pursuing big GIS contracts," Colby said. "But when they get it, they'll need somebody to fill these tasks." Because of a shortage of GIS-trained workers, companies often turn to their computer programmers, draftsmen or other technicians and have them learn GIS, she said. "People with GIS certification average about $12,000 more in annual salary than non-GIS-trained people doing the same type of work," Colby said." See also previous related stories.

All Points Blog links to an article on the recurring debate this summer about the democratization of GIS and whether GIS professionals will still be as much valuable as they are now. From the article: "With the arrival of online mapping services such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth, geographic information systems (GIS) are now at the fingertips of every Tom, Dick and Mary with an Internet connection. This strikes Vint Cerf as good news. The chief Internet evangelist at Google Inc., and one of the founding fathers of the Internet, says he’d like to see a geographic equivalent of Wikipedia — “Geopedia,” he dubs it — where anyone could add to the world’s geographic know-how. Jack Dangerman is skeptical. He’s the president of Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc., a leading GIS software vendor in Redlands, Calif., known as ESRI. He worries that even the best-intentioned amateur could provide inaccurate data that could lead to a disaster. “Who wants to dig a hole and run into a pipe?” Dangerman asks. [...] “Let’s not just democratize GIS data usage; let’s democratize data creation,” he says. Ron Lake, CEO of GIS software vendor Galdos Systems Inc. in Vancouver, says there is a place for “crowd-sourcing data,” and GIS professionals need to be willing to work with it. However, he adds, “there is such a thing as expert interpretation of information.”" See also related stories.