Give Geography its place... not a bad idea!

Dan shares this interesting resource with me... an organization devoted to giving Geography its place!  The GGiP Campaign (http://www.passion4geography.co.uk/)  has two key aims: 1. To raise the profile of Geography as an academic subject in all forms of the media (newspapers, magazines, the internet, tv, radio, advertising, etc). 2. To increase awareness of the importance of Geography and the vital role that it plays in schools, colleges and universities in preparing young people for the complexities of life in the 21st century. The group wants to recruit devoted followers that will help the cause to give geography and geographers the recognition they deserve. Check out the Guardian anti-geography quotes that they've compiled... its quite funny, however, its also amusing that the group is trying to put them in their place... kudos! Add your name to the growing list of supporters. See http://www.geointeractive.co.uk/petition.htm

use Office Templates for just about everything

A tip: We all use Microsoft Office for some things... here's a hint to help make your life a bit easier. Did U know that MS makes available a TON of Office templates. Everything from resume, press release, product flyer, newsletters etc... it's all here. Select from a host of Word, Excel, and Access templates. There's ever shopping checklists, greeting cards, and numerous financial templates ... see http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/default.aspx

Forbes on Google - the road ahead, LBS ads, radio, and a formal developer program

Forbes online has just published an interesting piece that looks at the direction of Google.. this coming from the latest Zeitgeist event the company hosted. Some items of interest include the company's lead in their advertising solutions and the penetration they've made with mobile ads - great click-through due to the location sensitive aspect of this space. Also, the company's newspaper ads and coming soon Google radio ads... yes indeed, all keyword based as a focal point. And how about this little tidbit...  the company will soon come up with a formal program for developers using its open interfaces Apparently the plan down the road is for the developer program to become more centralized and orderly in an attempt to standardize and simplify it.. makes sense. For more see this great read at Forbes - http://www.forbes.com/business/2006/10/05/google-advertising-zeitgeist-tech-cz_qh_1005google.html

Late night Billiard dominos

off topic... A little Late night reading and something kinda fun from youtube... ok this dude has way too much time on his hands... enjoy!

Art of the Start in Waterloo

Guy Kawasaki is giving an Art of the Start speech for Communitech Friday, October 6th at 11:00 am in Fed Hall on the University of Waterloo campus. Anyone in or near Waterloo (that's in Canada eh!) might want to go see Guy... he's a great motivator! See details

chacha search engine... searching the web with a real, live person helping you!

I just read an article about a new search engine called ChaCha. It offers up basic search apparently using the dmoz open directory results (I think). It also has a guided search where a real person holds your hand and helps with your search. Apparently these are staffers (paid inn the area of $5 hr) to help you locate what you need. I had ChristinaL helping me but I have to say I'm still on the fence. In a test for "california Digital raster graphics" I enter the string in an "IM-ish" dialogue box and wait for my helper to come up with some hits. Using their vanilla search the results I find are weak to say the least. My CA DRG search which should comme up with CASIL you would think, has the state of Californa as #1, the CA constitution as #2, and the CA Libertarian party as #3... I think I'll stick with Google for now! Oh... I'm still waiting for my helper to get back to me with something useful... LOL - see www.chacha.com and try for yourself, it's quite amusing... apparently they need guides too! Oh, now my guide tells me to wait while she finds something for me.. about 4 minutes later I'm still waiting. As I wait I go and check out their blog... to my amazement this commpany has recently been written up in countless magazines and was even featured on Good Morning America... Jesus man, for what??? Obviously they have a great PR team working for them. I have no idea why this would garner so much attention... reminds me of the dot.bomb days of the 90s! I decide to give the engine a second test this time looking for "symbian S60 freeware"... i wait about 2 minutes and my guide "LaShanna" finds a few results and the one I expected came up number 1 (from SymbianOne.com) ... ok, kind of cool I guess but do people have time for this? Not sure, although the feelilng of having a real person with you is kind of interesting. I have to wonder how often they get propositioned though!

GITA's 2007 Awards Program

Heads-up... Nominations are now open for GITA's 2007 Awards Program, and we invite you to submit your application today. The submission process is easy! Simply read the award descriptions below, choose the one that best suits you or your client, then fill out the appropriate online submission form. A special panel of industry experts will assist in the selection process for these awards.

webinar today - What's New in the Geodatabase at ArcGIS 9.2

A reminder... ESRI's training crew is offering up a free webinar today titled What's New in the Geodatabase at ArcGIS 9.2. Grab a coffee and spend an hour taking in this session if your interested in hearing what's new and want to ask some questions. The morning session is now done but you can catch the following... 11 AM, & 3 PM Pacific (Los Angeles) - the session will be posted in the archives in the future if you can't make it today - see http://training.esri.com/campus/seminars/index.cfm

NeoWorks web counters and maps... a nice blogging tool for geobloggers!

You may have noticed the nifty little antique map displayed in the upper right sidebar area. This Neocounter is courtesy of NeoWorx who provide some very slick blogger site management tools and counters. This applet tracks visitrs and displays their location on a map (antique in this instance). The administration area for your tools is very easy to use and the quality of the graphics they use is great... have fun with this one you geobloggers and if you add a cool map counter/tracker to your blog tell me about it will ya! See http://www.neoworx.net

Multimap offering up a sweet Wi-Fi hotspot finder

This comes from Multimap... a great way to find out if you'll have Wi-Fi while on the road. You will be Guided to Your Nearest Wi-Fi Hotspots!

WeRoam’s customers can find their nearest Wi-Fi hotspots, for almost any address in Europe and North America, and access interactive maps showing their exact locations, together with the hotspots available in a given neighbourhood. The service is available on www.weroam.com by simply clicking on the Hotspot Directory Service link on the home page. The user can click down to the desired hotspot using the interactive geographic map finder or use Multimap’s real-time geocoding engine. To use the latter, the user selects the country of interest, enters a street address and city, and/or postal code. The Hotspot Directory Service then delivers a list of the nearest Wi-Fi hotspots fitting the user’s specifications, with full contact details and a link to a Multimap interactive, street-level map which represents their respective locations as icons. Full contact details plus information about supported authentication modes appear beneath the map delivered. This one is a nice score!

Real estate and lessons learned

My latest dealings in real estate are teaching me loads about business. Actually, I've always applied many of these principles to things that I do, however, the experience has showed me that there's many things you need to keep in mind in a real estate deal that you should also apply to your business. Most noteworthy:
- stay informed and do as much research as possible before you make any rash decisions
- got a tough decision to make... sleep on it if possible then decide
- if there's something that others may percieve as a negative, tkae a hard look at the situation and put a positive spin on it
- hiring a contractor... interview atleast 3 of them before you jump in
- be careful when doing business with friends
- use technology... in a competitive environment the one who adopts technology to get a competitive advantage will win
I cold go on and on but I've watched about 27 innings of baseball today and I'm now rambling a bit... go Padres!

Updates from the NSGIC conference

Over at the NSGIC blog there's loads of news from the annual conference. Check it out for the latest from this popular event taking place this week... nice job! see http://www.nsgic.org/blog/

developing Mashups with Virtual Earth

Popular Java developer resource FTPonline has recently touched on the topic of developing with Virtual Earth. A couple of interesting comments from the writer include:  And Virtual Earth seems to have more high-resolution photos than its Google counterpart, making it more fun to play with ... and  Virtual Earth's many digital sources of geographic data also make it a great platform for mash-ups. He then goes on to look at an example mashup he created for the publication about the events they attend each year. See more at http://www.ftponline.com/special/web20/pvarholasp/

Yahoo! to open up Yahoo Mail API to programmers and mashers

Yahoo announced at Yahoo Hack Day that they'll open Yahoo Mail, so programmers can develop extensions and new interfaces for Yahoo Mail. The new API, that will be available later this year, will use Yahoo's browser-based authentication.   Officials from Yahoo! (of the world's largest Internet media company) said on Friday it planned to give away the underlying code to Yahoo Mail. Here's a sample of what developers are thinking...  an app could allow e-mail users to use the photo stream of Yahoo's photo-sharing program Flickr to see visual clues of what's inside each e-mail. Mention of "cats" or "New York" would trigger relevant photos from Flickr. Can't wait to see what kind of sweet mashups come out of this! FYI, Yahoo! mail recently launched a beta AJAX version

FortiusOne - new kid on the geospatial block?

Here's some info about a relatively "new kid on the Geospatial block" FortiusOne. FortiusOne (www.fortiusone.com) develops products that analyze infinite realms of data to provide visual maps that help businesses and individuals make better decisions. Applications have included prepare for potential disasters and infrastructure weaknesses. FortiusOne's maps also help companies determine preposition and redeploy their resources to increase profits, minimize damage and maintain production. Individuals can use the maps to garner much more sophisticated knowledge about their region of interest. The company was spun out of George Mason University where FortiusOne founders conducted research on infrastructure security. A little more from the "about the company" section... While at GMU, Dr. Gorman was chosen as a Subject Matter Expert for the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Securityճ Task Force on Critical Infrastructure Protection where his research was applied to evolving federal government and homeland security policies while helping make the business case for infrastructure security investment by the private sector.

Central Florida GIS

The CFGIS initiative seeks to increase coordination among users of geographic information systems in Central Florida. Its two primary components are a regional users group and a data clearinghouse. The portal provides access to community message boards, data, and other useful user resources. Users Group and Data Clearinghouse for 10 counties in the central Florida area: Marion Flagler Volusia Sumter Lake Seminole Orange Osceola Polk and Brevard Counties - See http://www.cfgis.org

Google Earth COM API and documentation

Of interest to you Google earth developers, or wanna be developers,  the Google Earth COM API and Documentation. The Google Earth COM API is designed to let third party applications query information from and send commands to the Google Earth software. Through IApplicationGE, external applications can query the current viewport, control the 3D camera, enable, disable, load KML features, traverse features, and more. See http://earth.google.com/comapi/

event reminder - South Florida GIS Expo

An update from an event that I wasn't familiar with... The 13th Annual South Florida GIS Expo http://www.sfrpc.com/gisexpo/welcome.htm will be held this Thursday & Friday (Oct. 5th - 6th) at the Palm Beach County Convention Center (West Palm Beach, FL). Today is the last day for online registration http://www.sfrpc.com/gisexpo_reg.asp

Asian Remote Sensing Research Survey

Global Marketing Insights, Inc. and NOAA Satellite and Information Service are asking geospatial professionals to help out by completing an Asian Remote Sensing Research Survey. According to the company "Your industry knowledge and insight is needed to complete this valuable industry research." Similar to the first survey, the new project will study aerial and space-borne remote sensing trends and activities in more than 20 Asian countries, including Australia. Global Marketing Insights has tailored a series of online surveys covering issues relating to eight sectors of the remote sensing market: aerial film, aerial digital, aerial sensors, satellites, commercial end users, value added hardware and software, academic and government. The survey will take five-minutes to complete. Simply select the appropriate survey that best represents the area that you are employed in or affiliated with and you may complete more than one survey as you see fit.  Survey Link - http://www.empliant.com/NOAA-remote-sensing-research