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

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.

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.

We warned our readers about some geonews being published at a slower rate than usual but claimed that you won't miss anything major. Here's Microsoft geonews wrap-up for February. Let's start with the big data update announced this week with new birds eye and 3D cities in Virtual Earth, including significant additions in Portugal, Italy, and Austria. There was also a data update in January detailed here. Here's more on the upcoming World Wide Telescope (WWT), dubbed by many as Microsoft's answer to Google Sky (previously this month). Here's a demonstration of the video recording function over new VE 3D buildings in Paris. Here's a video including Jack Dangermond on the ESRI-Microsoft partnership. There's also two important customers migrating to the Virtual Earth platform: YellowBook and Windermere. There's also a way to show Google My Maps data in Virtual Earth (via OE). APB links to an analysis of the local component of the possible Microsoft-Yahoo! merger. Several other Microsoft-related geonews were shared recently.

It's been a while since we shared a Slashgeo tip of the day. There's two main ways to share comments on Slashgeo: (a) replying on the "root" of the story by selecting the "Reply" button on the right-hand side below the story summary, and (b) replying to a specific user comment by selecting the "Reply to This" link immediately after the said comment. Why is the distinction important? For several reasons and I'll give you two: (1) if you reply to another user's comment instead of the root, that user will receive a notification that you replied and will be able to share more experience, opinion and information, and (2), when replying directly to a user comment, the comments threads will stick together.

Related to the comment and story interactions mechanism, Slashdot now uses AJAX for the display and interaction with their story pages. Their code has not been pushed to Slashcode (Slashgeo's open source engine). One significant improvement to Slashgeo, in our long to-do list, will be using this AJAX code since is will circumvent the requirement to reload full html pages. Nobody likes waiting for pages to reload! :-) We can't however provide a deadline since this code implementation is mainly in their hands.

For your curiosity, despite theoretically being in slow geonews publishing mode and thanks to our expanding team of Slashgeo "editors", I'm happy to report we're now at 7,000 direct unique visitors daily, a number which slowly climbs. This is important since we're all volunteers here trying to provide a useful and ad-free tool for the geospatial community we're part of. Cheers!

I'm happy to report a new small donation by MapElves.com. Our Open Budget has been updated but they won't show up on Slashgeo's donors hall of fame because they asked me to merge their donation to the one of MapForums. Thank you MapElves! We're trying our best to provide a useful service and your participation (e.g. such as comments and submissions) is always welcomed. Not everyone appreciate the service though, constructive critics are also always welcomed.

Rather off-topic, if this may encourage you to contribute and participate in your own communities, I recently read an interesting Herbert Simon 6-pages text named Altruism and Economics. Here's an extract: "In evolutionary theory, altruism means behavior that reduces the actor's fitness while enhancing the fitness of others. If the total contribution of the altruist to the fitness of others is greater than the fitness lost by the altruist, altruism will increase the prospects of the group's surviving in competition with other groups."

Spatially Adjusted links to an interesting discussion over the OSGeo-Discuss mailing list about open source careers and whether open source GIS software are up to par vs commercial GIS [Nabble link]. SA picks an insightful quote from Paul Ramsey, formerly of the Refractions fame: "My general synopsis: for server-side, for scriptability, for automation, for web-based, open source wins for most use cases, given a technically savvy user; for ad hoc, for cartographic production, for a user who is used to a point-n-click experience end to end, proprietary still wins."

Slashgeo regularly covers open source geospatial software. I copied some previous related stories below. With 52 North, the OSGeo and all the open source geospatial software such as the widely used GDAL, we can say open source geospatial software is in a healthy situation. Note that we also cover commercial geospatial software, including from ESRI. Editor's note: I usually read the OSGeo list myself and share interesting bits with our users, since I've been away from office, expect more thorough coverage after the summer. Meanwhile, there's always submissions.

I'm happy to report about new supporter of the Slashgeo.org initiative: BALIZ Inc. BALIZ offers several services and amongst them, they provide excellent geospatial news coverage in French. This donation is especially welcomed since we're theoretically in slow-news mode with plans to be back at full speed next fall. Our open budget has been updated accordingly. Thanks!