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.

SlashGISRS, which was renamed Slashgeo, was launched one year ago! :-) There are so many geospatial news sources, I feel Slashgeo's offer of aggregated news is useful. As for its usefulness as a discussion platform, the future will tell us :-) My curiosity in regards to what's to come is whether Slashgeo will stay a tool useful to some, or become a tool useful to many. After over 1250 published stories and over 1000 comments from anonymous visitors and about 730 registered members, I plan to continue feeding the site regularly, even if there will be some slower weeks when I'm away from my office (such as last week and last April-May). Anyone willing to contribute is more than welcomed! Our values include communication, openness and transparency. I have learned *a lot* in the process and I believe it's true also for the other founding members. We will continue to improve the site and many interesting features which will augment the information architecture of Slashgeo are in the works and should be released in the coming months. Hope you enjoy the tool! :-)

It's been a while since I haven't provided an update on Slashgeo. Let me take the recent breaking of 1000 registered members to share some thoughts. As I recently wrote about today's usefulness: "This is where I believe Slashgeo has value: trying to aggregate the most pertinent geospatial news so you don't have to monitor 50 online sources as I do." Launched a year and a half ago, Slashgeo now has about 3000 known unique readers daily, slowly going higher. The number of stories published generally varies between three and five every week day. There's plenty of exciting improvements I'd like to add to Slashgeo (such as completing the temporary GeoRSS map). But I have difficulties keeping the pace at feeding the site with pertinent stories, that's why I annoyingly regularly invite anyone interested to join our small team :-) Sharing stories from time to time is of course welcomed. I must admit that I'm not untouched by the occasional hate-mail I receive for running Slashgeo, but since there are much more encouraging mails coming in, I'm filled with enthusiasm! My dream is simple: I hope one day the site will sustain itself by having numerous people behind it and that the geospatial community will contribute and transform it into an even more valuable geospatial portal :-)

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

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.

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 :-)

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

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

Three years already! Life is full of surprises when you look for them (sometimes even when you don't look!), as Slashgeo's main enthusiast, I have learned a huge deal in the process. I hope and believe Slashgeo.org is a useful website for the geospatial community. We're unique because our small team reads and selects the most pertinent geonews for our users out of tens of geoblogs entries everyday. We also offer original content. We're ad-free and as much transparent as possible.

The stats? Not sure they matter as much a user participation, but for the curious ones: over 10 million hits in three years, 1,700 registered members, thousands of unique IP addresses reached everyday, 3,200 geonews "stories" published so far (surprising even to me!), almost 3,000 user comments shared (I admit a lot by me as story followups).

I planned many important updates for Slashgeo's website, namely upgrading to Slashdot's AJAX code for faster comment sharing and no page reloads, however, Slashcode's CVS tags are not up to date and my developer is unavailable until next January, so I fear we'll have to wait another few months at minimum.

The most important element of this year for me? New Slashgeo.org volunteer editors joining me since about a year ago (see related stories below). Sincere thanks to this small team, with a special thank you to Lennox (username lxnyce) which published hundreds of stories in a year and was instrumental to keeping Slashgeo relevant by publishing geonews in my absence (parental leave since January). I'm now back behind my office desk, but user contributions (e.g. submitting stories and sharing comments) are more than welcomed, they are required for the success of the website. I sincerely hope you like the service we provide - the geospatial sector is a pretty exciting playfield!