Google Maps helping summer tourists drive off the beaten path

Ever us Google Maps (gmaps) for your driving directions? For me its invaluable.. now they have a new addition for people that want to avoid major highways and Interstates etc... simply run your directions to/from here as usual then toggle the "Avoid Highway" option. A new route is then plotted, directions updated and highways are avoided... great for those of you who don't like to drive 55 - http://www.google.com/maps

Metacarta Offers try before you buy via Labs on a Stick

This comes via the Metacarta Devsite (aka. Metacarta Labs) ..   a collection of demos which can be run with no external dependancies. With a MetaCarta Labs USB stick, you simply insert the USB drive into the USB port, and double click the 'run' script for your platform to start up a local web server. Platforms which have been tested are OS X, Linux, and Windows. See http://labs.metacarta.com/on-a-stick/

Happy Memorial Day Week-end y'all

I guess I'll sign off till later and start enjoying the long week-end... a little cook-out, fire up the grill, put some cold New Belgium ales on ice and maybe a little apple pie (Rachel has a great recipe ;0) Have a fun and safe week-end all - you guys up in Victoria have a blast this Swiftsure week-end.. always my favorite week-end of the year up north as well! Ok... I confess... I'm a big HGTV fan (30 minute meals etc... hey, you gotta eat!)

Another immigration employment resource useful for tech companies and employees

Here's a tip for a useful resource for anyone involved in hiring or with a corporate HR department, particularly those that hire foreign nationals and in particular, sponsor applicants for TN or H1B visas - See the grasmick newsgroup http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jgrasmick/, the Grasmick website http://www.grasmick.com and be sure to get his monthly newsletter, its very informative and full of useful tips and the latest news. His handbook is great (I bought it) although if you contact Joe directly all he wants to know is how much $$ you make (weird!)

Landsat Data Available Through USGS Website - June 4

Heads-up... USGS Pilot Project Makes High-Quality Landsat Data Available Through Web - As of June 4, 2007, the USGS will be releasing selected Landsat 7 image data of the United States through the Web (glovis.usgs.gov or earthexplorer.usgs.gov). These data are of high quality with limited cloud cover.

GIS 2.0 remember the good old days when a map had a scale bar and a north arrow

An email from a GISuser.com reader prompted me to ponder this one and "toss it out there" for thought. From the reader... With all the hoopla over Google Maps, and other online maps, I am wondering if the definition of what a map is has changed? Should the online "maps" be called maps or should they really be called "graphics"?

In my definition of maps, a map has a title, legend, scalebar, and of course the mapped area. A graphic does not need to have the title, legend, and scale bar. It's just a graphic of an area... Indeed some valid thoughts, particularly when you look at the news, headlines, articles, and discussion taking place via online discussion boards, web forums, geoblogs, and even in GIS newsletters. It makes me wonder.. what ever happened to the topics of discussion from "back in the day" like map projections, datums, principles of cartography, symbology, data formats and translation ... remember the pen plotter, the digitizer, the Unix workstation. Remember the software platforms of the past that we heard about on a daily basis.. GRASS, PCI, PAMAP, Genamap, ArcView, heck, even AutoCAD with the ever popular command line which still draws applause when mentioned at AU!

In the world of GIS 2.0 (ala Web 2.0) are we consumed with topics like mashups, flash, RSS, KML, GML, Open GIS (what exactly is "open"). I can't recall the last time I attended a conference and sat in on a high-level session that didn't mention Google Earth, Google Maps, or mashups... man I feel old... remember the 90s! What a difference a decade makes. How do you feel about GIS 2.0... are you hyped? It's interesting when you look at the lineup at events like Where 2.0. The event's main focus is "location" - I recall last year headliners and presenters were from companies like Platial, Second Life, and even a company that tracks gum spots of all things - social networking was the buzz. It's interesting to see that after just one year the headlining names include ESRI, Autodesk, Tele Atlas, Leica Geosystems, Autodesk, Garmin, Digital Globe as well as "the new kids on the block" Mapquest, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google.

Maybe someone will come out with an innovative mashup that will incorporate a north arrow and a scale bar... maybe even reference a map projection or datum... how cool would that be?

Google + Feedburner = $100,000,000

You may have already seen this, maybe not.. Google is scooping up yet another content provider and complementary resource to bolster its advertising revenues.. this time its feedburner. Recall Feedburner is a cool app that creates an RSS feed for content publishers. It's quite a handy app really, enabling publishers to get more eyes on their feeds. I find it really handy as a means of establishing a permanent home for my RSS feed. An example.. over at GISuser our CMS creates an RSS feed (see http://www.gisuser.com/index2.php?option=com_rss&no_html=1) but what happens if we jump to a new CMS, move domains or ??? if we move our feed then all the efforts we put into promoting it and getting it indexed etc.. are for not. Using feedburner we create a permanent home for our feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GisUsercom it actually uses our source to build the feedburn. Of note, according to speculation the deal is worth a whopping $100 mill! kaching... betcha wished you would thought of that one! See http://www.feedburner.com/

Has the date of the ESRI UC affected your plans?

I see that James can't atten this year's ESRI UC because he has too much going on this June. It made me wonder if many others have this same issue - recall the annual ESRI UC is typically in July or even August.

Literature Trips via Google Earth - GoogleLitTrips

The applications involving Google Earth are seemingly endless... case in point; Here's a cool application developed by Google Certified Teacher Jerome Burg - GoogleLitTrips. This clever app is a great way to journey along some of literature's most classic road trips via Google Earth. See http://www.googlelittrips.org/ - some cool downloads are available including the following trips: Grapes of Wrath, Candide by Voltaire and many more. All trips are categorized according to grade.. this is awesome!!!

Gearing up for another ESRI USer Conference

Wow, time sto start thinking about the annual trek to San Diego - about 3 weeks and counting! Kicking things off (as I do every year) I've added a heads-up article on things to do at the conference. Included in this year's installment are tips, useful things to keep in mind for first time attendees, a few images, loads of pointers to previous year's coverage, and more. Check it out at http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/11711/ - Exhibiting Companies and presenters... be sure to once again send me details of your plans and what you'll be showing off this year, include details of special seminars, presentations, parties etc...

Google PhoneBook - The ultimate reverse lookup directory

Interesting watching CNN this morning as they delved deeper into Google and more specifically, the amount of information they way be collecting about you. Of note, your phone number - this is all the more reason to have an unlisted phone number. Big deal you might think... well, give it a try. My home number is unlisted so it doesn't appear (yet) so I tried banging in the number of a friend... sure enough front and center his name and his wife's name appears at the top of the page with a listing title "Phonebook results". Along with it, their address and a hyperlink to a map which pulls a quick google map with an icon showing the location of their home... this has some people really freaked out!

This from Google... Google has added the convenience of US street address and phone number lookup to the information we provide through our search box. You'll see publicly listed phone numbers and addresses at the top of results pages for searches that contain specific kinds of keywords.

So, what this means is its very easy for anyone to look-up listings for a US residence. Simply add any of the following combinations into the Google search box:

first name (or first initial), last name, city (state is optional)
first name (or first initial), last name, state
first name (or first initial), last name, area code
first name (or first initial), last name, zip code
phone number, including area code
last name, city, state
last name, zip code
There's no specific link to "The Google PhoneBook" although, you can easily have your residential phone and address information removed from the Google PhoneBook at http://www.google.com/help/pbremoval.html

Google Geocoding API gets an update

Google has announced an upgrade to the software used to handle North American addresses in their Geocoding API. From Google... "This upgrade improves the performance of our service and includes the following changes which may affect your applications:

1. The new geocoder contains an update to the underlying data set for North America.
2. The geocoder has also been updated so that it more intelligently handles incomplete input
3. In the XML data returned from the geocoder, there is a tag called "AdministrativeAreaName" that may contain the state where the address is located.
http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/index.html - See also http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com

Local Search is a breeze with Loki

Did you catch the focus piece I did on Loki the other day? Loki is a very cool location-sensitive toolbar you can integrate into your web experience. Download and install the Loki toolbar and you then have access to local search from your PC. The coolest part is simply entering a search string and loki goes out, returns a Google map based on your location, then you can search for anything with local results being returned... awesome! Eg. see my search results on pizza - see also www.loki.com and this Loki 2.0 spotlight http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/11663/28/

Looking for blogs from the Intergraph conference? I guess not

Looking for blogs and news from the Intergraph conference? Apparently not... a quick cruise through technorati searching on "Intergraph" http://www.technorati.com/tag/intergraph turned up pretty much nothing (except for one post by yours truly)... interesting the images section pulled images from Intergraph's UC in 2005 - curiously also posted by yours truly on our GISuser flickr. Searching DIGG (http://www.digg.com/search?section=news&s=intergraph) I found 3 hits. Joe F. who's from Huntsville AL has posted something this AM about the Neil Armstrong keynote (way cool!) but otherwise its pretty quiet.. too bad. Of interest on the wire I saw a few PR items released today (once again I had to go out and look for these) and one of them got my attention - this due to some clever keywords being used by the company... "Intergraph Integrates with Leading Interactive Mapping Services Delivers Custom Data for Rich Geospatial Mashups". Jumping on the bandwagon, looks like one of the selling points for GeoMedia WebMap 6.1 will be the ability to quickly and easily create mashups - ie. combining your data and queries with either the Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth map data. I didn't make it to the INGR gig again this year -- too bad or I likely wouldn't have to rant like this about the lack of exposure ;0) Getting back to a post of mine a few days ago, conference organizers these days would be wise to take advantage of the Web 2.0 and maybe setup a blogger or 2 of their own to get some news out. O'reilly Media does a great job of this with their events. http://conferences.oreillynet.com/ - Perhaps more info will fallout next week once attendees return home. Looking for a link to the INGR conference homepage? I'll share it with you here as you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone else linking to it - try http://www.intergraph2007.com

Who Gets the H1B Visas? Here's the Top 200 list

Some interesting findings on the distribution of H1B visas... last year nine Indian firms collectively were issued 19,512 of the 65,000 H-1B visas granted - that's almost one third of the available visas for technology workers going to 9 India firms. 5 of the top 10 were Indian outsourcing firms. Information week has published the list of the top 200 firms using up the "valuable" H1B visas.. familiar names include: Microsoft number three on the list, IBM number eight, and Oracle USA number nine. Of the Internet players YAhoo! comes in at number 47, Amazon number 81. US Coleges dominate the list though taking up the majority of the positions. So who's the biggest user of the H1B visa? Infosys Technologies who secured 4908 immigrant workers in 2006. See Information Week for more on this - http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=199601616

Terraserver WW2 D-Day aerial images gone?

Here's a mystery about some archived WW2 D-Day imagery that a reader has sent my way. Once upon a time (October of 2001 roughly) Terraserver announced they were putting up some cool aerial photos of D-Day on their web site at
http://www.terraserver.com/ww2_images.asp

 

Apparently the images are not there any more, but they used to be found at:
http://web.archive.org/web/
http://www.terraserver.com/ww2_images.asp
http://web.archive.org/web/20020210142241
http://terraserver.com/ww2_images.asp

 

Apparently some people still remember and mention these images. Example: http://www.smartcomputing.com/editorial/dictionary/detail.asp?guid=&searchtype=&DicID=19225&RefType=Encyclopedia
http://boards.cinemax.com/thread.jspa?threadID=263&start=75&tstart=0
http://www.31stwc.com/archived.html  (white text on a white background -- hard to read!)

 

From the reader though... "But try as I might, I can't find them anymore." There's a UK web site: http://www.evidenceincamera.co.uk/  that is supposed to make available loads of WW2 Aerial Reconnaissance Archives, but the site is pretty thin on content and uses weird applets or something to view images. So... the reader would be interested in once again having access to these old images in digital  form again, and would like to georectify them and put them online once more, likely as a Google earth overlay. Any leads or tips on these images are appreciated??

Virgin (USA) jumps into Local Search

A new mobile search functionality by integrating a WAP-based local search application from JumpTap, Inc. Launching this week, the new local search application enables Virgin Mobile USA customers to type in specific search terms, along with a zip code or city and state, to find anything local - from pizza shops to the closest CD store. The new capabilities also allow customers to search for local maps and directions to and from destinations, from their mobile phones.  Now, Virgin Mobile offers on-and off-portal search in one easy, WAP-based application.  So what's all the hype about local search -- it's all about the location man and getting local, location-sensitive results! www.virginmobileusa.com / www.jumptap.com

US Immigration, the H1B visa, Sen. MCcain and Google

The topic of the US immigration policy is obviously of interest to yours truly - recall I am a Canadian residing in the US. An article of interest appeared today that I wanted to share.. apparently US Senator McCain paid a visit to the Googleplex recently and was asked a number of questions in his "job interview"... the topic of immigration came up... "If Google is going to be able to maintain its supremacy in the world, it is going to have to continue to get the best and the brightest from all over the world, and I accept with your gigantic egos, that you are the best…we need an H1B visa program that works". I frequently scour the web for material about the H1B visa - recall this year the quote expired on day 1 leaving many people out of luck - one day??? 2 years ago it took months to hand out 65,000 H visas WTF??? It's interesting to see how the topic dominates the India press - I guess it should since they hoard about 80% of all the H1B visas - a little heavy in my opinion.. how about spreading them around a bit eh? Aussies also have an unfair advantage and have an assured quote of Visas made available to them - a pretty cozy arrangement. The H1B visas topic is important to the high tech industries (even geospatial) and will affect many big names (think ESRI, Autodesk, Sun, HP, Google, and many others). Finally, it will be interesting to see if illegal residents are provided amnesty and a chance at getting a green card simply by paying up $5k (gee, I wish I had that opportunity)... until then those seeking to work in the US legally have it tougher every year. More on this topic in this blog post over at ZDnet - http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=1393

Checked out Terraserver Beta yet?

Just browsing terraserver and hopped over to have a looksee at the new Beta version. Check it out.. search for imagery by address, coordinates, or township. Obviously this version is taking advantage of the recent partnership with mytopo as it's now very simple and evident that you can quickly order prints of the imagery - see http://beta.terraserver.com - if you ever need a cool poster or print of your office, your home, maybe an NFL stadium or ??? this is a great resource to bookmark

HD View viewer from Microsoft Research's Interactive Visual Media group

A side note on something cool from Microsoft research - HD View is a new viewer developed by Microsoft Research's Interactive Visual Media group to aid in the display and interaction with very large images. From the team... HD View was developed with a number of goals in mind. It should:

allow smooth panning and zooming on large images, only download enough data to create the current view (and possibly look ahead to the next), and always display the current field of view with an appropriate projection. This means that when zoomed way in you should be presented with a standard perspective projection providing a sense of immersion, and when zoomed out you experience a curved projection so that get a full overview of the scene. In between the projection should smoothly transition. Finally, it should be easy to create your own HD View content and present it to the world via the web. Create your own HD View content - here's a very cool sample... Harlem-13-gigapixels A massive 13 Gigapixel panorama created by stitching 2045 12 Megapixel photographs http://www.harlem-13-gigapixels.com/harlem_hdview.html - See details of HD View at http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView.htm

Swivel serving up data goodies

Need data.. maybe you want to chase some political facts and figures, or maybe socio-economic data, or what about health stats... try swivel. this is an interesting and information-rich resource focused on data. Apparently the company is expanding and will be offering up more geodata but we'll have to wait for the announcement to be made at Where 2.0.. stay tuned for more on this one... See http://swivel.com/ or all data at http://swivel.com/data_sets

Going to Where 2.0 and Google Developer day? Stick around for ISDE5

Going to Where 2.0 and Google Developer day? If so stick around another week for this one! International Symposium on Digital Earth (ISDE5) June 5-9, on the Campus of U.C. Berkeley. Some snipets... Google Earth’s Michael Jones will keynote on June 5 and Rebecca Moore will highlight several Google Earth projects on the environment and human rights as well, on June 6. The meeting also features Dr. Edgar Mitchell (the 6th man to walk on the moon), Ambassador John McDonald, Dr. Doug Englebart (inventor of the mouse), Dr. Bob Corell (chair of Arctic Impact Assessment) and many others. See the website at www.isde5.org for all the latest details.

With Bloggers like this from Nokia who needs a marketing team! Nokia N95 gets b$%^ slapped

I couldn't resist this one as I was browsing a thread that caught my eye - the title was "Convergence and Integration". The author then goes on to describe how non-useful his Nokia N95 was and how his preference for the iPod prevailed (pretty hard to believe if you ask me). Anyway, what's odd is that this blogger is posting on an "official" Nokia blog, yet ripping on the N95... I'm sure corporate is really pleased about that! Dameon also goes on about his dislike for flickr as well.. gee, what mobile apps does this guy like?? I guess the long and short of this post is that the iPod works and is simple to use and a breeze to get music on and off of - he obviously uses a Mac. I'm not really sure why the author has issues with moving data on/off of his N95... I've always found that the Nokia PC Suite seems capable of accomplishing all of that and then some - See the thread for yourself over at the S60 blogs http://blogs.s60.com/seeintos60/2007/05/convergence_and_integration.html

Nokia N95 apps, freeware, and useful stuff

Something of interest to anyone using or considering getting a Nokia N95 (you know, that cool $600 GPS-enabled smart phone)... over at LBSzone we've started a resource devoted to apps and tools for the N95 user. Our suggested tools and tips to date include a number of business and productivity tools, location-aware apps to take advantage of the built-in GPS, mobile TV feeds and resources, and much more. See http://www.lbszone.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=28&func=selectcat&cat=14

Upload and share your KML shapes via the shapewiki

Need a shape (think outline map) .. check out this new shapewiki... users import and share their shapes via KML or GeoRSS format.ShapeWiki provides three things: 1) a point-and-click interface to make it easy to define shapes on top of a map; 2) a tagged repository of shapes anyone can browse; 3) import / export mechanisms so you can use the shapes in your own application. An interesting concept although I'm not sure what I'd use it for at the moment. See http://shapewiki.com (Source of inspiration onthis one - slashgeo)

Oreilly Radar on mapping portals - look at Google maps, Yahoo!, ask

Over at Oreilly Radar Brady Forest has taken a quick take at online mapping portals - Yahoo!, Ask, Google, etc... Forest did a good job examining trends in local search, exploring the immersive data products (think 2.5 D) and looking at the routing and data suppliers used by the big boys. Some interesting companies reference by Forest include http://www.facet-tech.com/, http://www.facet-tech.com/SightMap/SightMap.htm, and http://urbanmapping.com - see the article at http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/trends_of_onlin.html

DIGG it with snap - snapshots + digg = way cool mashup

I just got wind of a way cool mashup that integrates Snap Shots with the latest posts from DIGG. If your not familiar with Snap its a cool application that enables web users a chance to preview (aka. snapshot) of websites in a little preview pane prior to clicking-through - its aquite cool and a very friendly addition to any site - we use snap here on this blog so simply mouse over any hyperlink to see an example. The mashup provides a visual glimpse at the latest updates from DIGG - you can see my DIGGs at http://digg.com/users/gletham/news/dugg - you can see the Snap / Digg mashup at http://www.yourminis.com/swfs/diggexpose.swf