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Slashgeo's Third Year Anniversary
posted by Satri
on Tuesday September 23, @12:19PM
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from the happy-happy-joy-joy dept.
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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!
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!
Related Stories
The State of the Geospatial Community: A Followup
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Several blogs have expressed thoughts on the state of the geospatial community during the last week. It started with the GIS Dev Cafe entries one, two and conclusion on the GIS community. You then have Vector One, Dave Bouwman and The Memory Leak's comments on the geospatial community. All entries are worthed the read. In last November, I shared my own personal thoughts on what is the geospatial community. I was interview by the Very Spatial team (at a moment when I was quite sick - I'm surprised the interview has not come out worst than it is), you can listen to the 30-minutes podcast which includes insights from David Maguire of ESRI, Kavita Pandit, current President of AAG, Kathleen Ridgely, New Media Director of National Geographic Magazine and from the Very Spatial crew themselves. I finally took the time to listen to it (I still have 15 VS episodes to catch up). I believe this topic is very interesting. What are we as a community? Is our diversity a strength or fragmenting us? How can we improve our community to help fulfill its potential?
Update on Call to Collaborators, New Poll and New Donations
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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 :-)
Slashgeo Two Years Anniversary
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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!
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!
Sharing and Replying to User Comments 6 comments
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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!
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!
New Donation to Slashgeo.org from BALIZ Inc
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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!
Slashgeo Short Summer Status Report
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Dear Slashgeo users and readers, I recently came back from about 3 months travelling with my small family with no computer access (how nice it feels to be disconnected once in a while! It helps see things in perspective). One big 'thank you' to our team of voluntary editors which feed the site with numerous geonews this summer and to your contributions.
I significantly slowed my participation to the site since the birth of my daughter last January. I'm going back to office in late September, that's when I expect things to go "back to normal" on my side and then able to publish more geostories myself. Slashgeo is a site for you, our users, and we'll be trying our best to improve it in the coming months. Stay tuned :-) - Alex
I significantly slowed my participation to the site since the birth of my daughter last January. I'm going back to office in late September, that's when I expect things to go "back to normal" on my side and then able to publish more geostories myself. Slashgeo is a site for you, our users, and we'll be trying our best to improve it in the coming months. Stay tuned :-) - Alex
Slashgeo's Third Year Anniversary
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