Slashgeo

First, I'm happy to announce a new financial donation to help Slashgeo.org stay not too far below the red line, ThinkGeo.com (blog entry) is now amongst the Slashgeo.org top donors. Thank you! Donors have a link to them in the right side column.

Second, I admit I'm not entirely proud of Slashgeo's geonews coverage since the beginning of the year. As most of you already know, Slashgeo is ad-free and is ran only by voluntary contributions, mainly time given by a small team of geoenthusiasts to aggregate the most pertinent geonews out there for the geospatial community. For the last two years and a half, I've had a lot of precious help from other enthusiasts who joined the Slashgeo bandwagon as editors, but I still publish most of the stories on Slashgeo at the moment. Being a new father and away from my day job for a while, I have trouble finding the required time to adequately feed Slashgeo on a regular basis. Unless something unexpected happens and instead of being myself constantly worried, I ask you, our dear users, to allow a reduction of service for the coming months until about September. This does not mean Slashgeo will stop publishing, it just means we'll more than ever rely on user contributions and, even if efforts will be done to cover the most pertinent geonews, they may be published with a delay of a few days or more. Hopefully, Slashgeo should afterward go back to our more frequent and timely geonews publishing. Thank you for your comprehension. Alex aka Satri.

A small glitch prevented a significant amount of our 1,550 registered members to received the daily stories summary by email for last Friday, here it is. Friday coverage included many major geonews about Microsoft and Google amongst others. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I'm happy to report a new donation to Slashgeo.org, this time from MapForums.com. Slashgeo's revenues are entirely based on user donations. I updated our Open Budget accordingly.

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!