Some masher updates of interest... Philip over at batchgeocoder (http://batchgeocode.blogspot.com/) has penned some comments that compare the google maps API vs Yahoo! maps API vs Mapquest API. It's an interesting read and starts to touch on some of the issues that many developers likely have in the back of their minds... you need to be aware of the licensing, be aware of the restrictions and limitations, and be aware that your application may rely entirely on someone else's technology... this could be particularly troubling, particularly those that depend on their mashups for revenue - this actually brings up a good question - are people making $$ off their mashups and if so, how lucrative have they been? I always tends to fall back on all the old sayings, like... let the buyer beware, and you get what you pay for! I'm not bashing the companies that are providing the tools.. after all, they've been upfront. More on the topic of "fragile mashups" have been provided in a recent post by Brian Flood (developer of Arc2earth) - I suggest you give it a read at http://www.spatialdatalogic.com/cs/blogs/brian_flood/archive/2006/03/07/244.aspx - see also this article at Zdnet titled "mashups: who's really in control?" (http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=128) - the article is a good read and discusses exactly what you may have thought on many occasions... mashups relay on someone else's data and business model.. a scary situation that leaves developers vulnerable. The article uses Craig's list as an example.. recall Craig's list pulled the plug on the scrapping of it's data by a commerical mashup at http://www.oodle.com/ which was making loads of $$ using Craig's data but costing craig's list precious bandwidth... on the flip-side, a free, one-man show at http://www.housingmaps.com/ got craig's blessing to scrape their data.
Rob Shanks (President, GlobeXplorer) maintains a blog at http://earthmapping.blogspot.com/ to provide an insight into his company's mapping and online imagery services. Recently, Rob provided a point to a post over at the ASK.com weblog which discussed in detail the Ask Map services (see http://blog.ask.com/2006/03/inside_ask_maps.html). The thread is essentially a "welcome" to Ask Maps from Product Manager Andy Yang but it's a good start and a decent lead to yet another weblog to add to your links. So how does Google MAps compare to Ask MAps? Check out what users are saying in this DIGG - http://www.digg.com/technology/New_Ask.com_Maps_upgrades_to_beat_Google_Maps
Are you following Google legal woes in this one... myself I've always been on the fence as to the merits of the Google ads. In the past I've used the ads on websites (not on GISuser) as part of my effort to "play along" with them... convinced that using adwords likely helps in your websearch placement within the search engine... makes sense to take care of your customers right? In a testbed last year I definitely noticed some very odd stuff going on with the Google adsense and adwords reports... in a nutshell, I was spending about 3 times more per month to serve those pesky little text ads and constantly getting keywords falling off, only to get a message from Google stating that I need to increase my PPC (pay per click) to 25 cents up from 10!! On the flip side, revenues from serving ads took a nose-dive during the same period, with monthly revenues being slashed by more than 60%... of course when asking Google about these results I was told that obviously my ads were not performing as well on the site, yadayadayada. It's been a fun test-bed, overall though I'm still skeptical. The google ads provide a nice revenue stream for non-commercial sites, however, anyone depending on this to feed their family will likely be disappointed and the real benefit is having "relevant" content constantly streamed to the website. Paying to have your own ads served is definitely worthwhile, however, effective targeting requires constant monitoring. See more about the litigation at Reuters - http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=businessNews&storyID=2006-03-09T042852Z_01_N08534695_RTRUKOC_0_US-GOOGLE-CLICKFRAUD.xml
Here on Vancouver Island, Jason Birch has been doing some homework to dig up what's coming not only in Autodesk 2007, but with Autodesk Map 3D 2007... he's made some interesting findings and has some great leads. For starters, he leads us to Shaan Hurley's Autodesk weblog for a great roundup of what people are saying about 2007 (see http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2006/03/autocad_2007.html). He found little to speak about regarding Map 3D and the road ahead, however, he does refer to Taylor Technologies and a nice find (http://taylor-tech.com/software/getSoftwareByID/13/view.html). In short, Jason figures Autodesk is really going to focus on GIS at 2007 (as well as the development of a PostGIS FDO provider wit Mapguide open source) and he makes the following comment... "Autodesk has made a huge leap in allowing us to choose the right geospatial tool for the job." See Jason's Blog on http://www.jasonbirch.com/nodes/2006/03/04/8/closed-and-open-and-better-oh-my/... nice stuff!
