Author: James

Link – Virtual Places

Virutal Places is a mashup of Virtual Earth, and various web services (including Amazon, Weather.com, Flickr, Feedmap, GeoBloggers, GeoURL, MSN Search and MapPoint). The app brings the concept of gadgets (ala live.com) in the context of a map. Gadgets can not only consume your current view, or selected locations, and bring in interesting data about that spot, but also contribute locations of interest and allow the user to add more, thus creating an immersive mapping experience.

I’ve been playing with this for a couple days and I’m very, very impressed with its look and functionality. Nikhil goes into some depth on how he created the web application on his blog, and it is unfortunate that this only works on Internet Explorer. A great example on how to create a very impressive AJAX application, but also a good example of why the Flash interface does have its advantages.

You’ll notice there is a big change here at Spatially Adjusted. After some long hard thinking, I’ve moved from Movable Type to WordPress for my blog management system. I’ve used Movable Type for years and have paid and donated to keep the project alive, but it seems for one reason or another I’ve been having performance issues with the CGI scripts. So I’ve moved to WordPress and hopefully this won’t be too big of a deal in the short term as long term this will help a ton.

You shouldn’t have to resubscribe to the RSS feeds, but if you’ve stopped getting updates you might want to visit the footer of this blog and resubscribe. The one part that won’t convert over is the email subscription. If you currently use this to keep up to date on posts, click here (or got to the page footer) and resubscribe.

Update – I got the redirect working so all old blog entries point to the new site. My RSS Reader updated to the new feed so I’m hopeful that others will. I know some have had trouble with Thunderbird redirecting its feed so you might want to check just to be sure.

Link – Advertising arrives in Google Earth

ESRI might want to reconsider its position……..How about partnering with Yahoo’s or Microsoft’s search services instead, if ESRI is not planning to enter the search market itself? ESRI could thus fund their free version by letting Yahoo or MSN run their ads in ArcGIS Explorer-initiated searches.

I don’t get it. Why would anyone want to ad advertisements in a product that doesn’t have them? There is no room for Vioxx ads in professional GIS. I mean, who would want MSN ads in every .NET application you created using Visual Studio? No one of course, unless they are Google fans. I don’t get the logic of selling your soul for the ability to use free Google products (disclaimer: I use GMail so I’m in cahoots with the devil also). Google Earth is all about pushing advertising into a new marketplace and ArcGIS Explorer is about disseminate geospatial information to the masses. That is clear to me now.

Link – Location, Location, Location. Research, Research

Some of the most valuable data are the permit applications. You may want to know about electrical or plumbing upgrades or the replacement of a roof. The permits may tell you whether that garage that has been converted into an apartment is legal. Sure, the sellers are supposed to disclose all these things. But do you think they do? The city of Portland, Ore., packs its site, www.portlandmaps.com, with this sort of information

Glad to see the team over at PortlandMaps get some more recognition for their great work. Any city, large or small should use their site as a benchmark on how to provide spatial information to their citizens.

Link – scrappad

J has been posting on the ESRI New Zealand User Conference. He says the theme is “South Pacific” which seems redundant since they are in the South Pacific, but I guess maybe its more of a Hawaiian thing than a M’ori theme. Anyway J, when do we get to see the photos? You did such a great job at the International UC, that I was hoping to see you wearing your matching shirt.

The list has grown quite long over the last few months and this doesn’t even include the ESRI blogs I have in a separate folder.. It is interesting that if you blog begins with the letter “G” (and this is true for ESRI blogs too), you have a good chance of being on Blogger. I’m looking forward to the next release of FeedDemon which will allow me to get reports on how often many of these blogs actually publish. Should be interesting reading, then again maybe not.

Link – Ads Coming to Google Earth

apparently you can expect to see some form of onscreen advertising in GE soon. But, to turn them off you will need to have a subscription of Google Earth Plus or Pro. It will be interesting to see how this is implemented and what the reaction will be from the general GE users.

Well there goes the reason to use Google Earth. Who wants to create a KML and then have Google earn money off of my work? I said back in August that Google was an advertising company and it becomes clear that is what Google Earth is to them, ad revenue. All these really nice Google Earth KML/KMZ “hacks” are now going to be used to further increase Google’s revenue.

Most of us knew this day was coming and unfortunately it is just about here. It will be interesting to see how it all works, will downloading any KML files from PortlandMaps get me results for real estate agents, mortgage refinance companies and probably Vioxx ads? The implications of this are huge as eBay ads for just about anything can now be fed to users just trying to find out voting districts in their home towns.

The sooner ArcGIS Explorer is out the better it will be for those who want to distribute maps to the general populace. KML still is important, but Google Earth has become so much less relevant to my workflow.

I posted over on The Map Room about that I didn’t care for the Flash viewer for Yahoo! Maps and a poster asked me to elaborate. Since I’ve upgraded to Flash 8.0, it seems to respond much faster than it did before (when I was still using Flash 7), but that brings up my biggest issue to way I don’t like flash as a viewer. I’ve always liked Autodesk Mapguide as a web mapping tool, but its biggest drawback was that you needed a plugin to get it to work and even then that plugin only ran on Internet Explorer. Back in the day this wasn’t such a big deal as almost no one used another browser than IE, but these days it just kills the product (there is a beta version of a Mozilla/Firefox extension available now).

Now Flash is cross browser and mostly cross platform so it really doesn’t have the same problems that Mapguide had, but the performance issues I had with an older version of Flash just proves my point that plugins aren’t the best way to view online maps, especially if there is no real reason to do so. Flickr used to have a flash interface which was nice, but since then they have moved to a AJAX interface that is so much better and works in any recent browser.

With AJAX you can use tools such as Greesemonkey to add features to websites that aren’t there (such as a delete button for Gmail) which is impossible with Flash. I guess as a programmer, I like to be able to work with just about everything on a webpage, rather than just have an embedded objection on the page. The Flash object becomes off-limits to me.

In the end since upgrading to Flash 8.0, I’ve begun to care less about getting rid of the Flash interface in Yahoo! Maps, but unless I see some real good reasons to use a plugin (eye candy isn’t one), I’d just assume not bother.

Link – 2005 Nordic Developers Conference

I presented on ArcWeb, showing some highlights from ArcWeb 2006 (yes, it’s now called 2006 even if we are releasing it in 2005). I did not get too much feedback, I presume this is mostly because the model of web services and SOA in GIS is still not widely used/accepted there yet but I’m very hopeful.

I have an idea. Go find Brian and his camera and create a video of the new features of ArcWeb 2006. Post it and I’m sure you’ll get some good feedback.

Anyway, glad to hear it will be out soon.

Link – Mapbuilder.net

MapBuilder.net is an Web2.0 service that is used to build custom Google and Yahoo maps without any knowledge of the Google/Yahoo Maps API and JavaScript. MapBuilder provides a decent visual interface for the map building process, which includes geocoding features. Also MapBuilder lets users tag locations on their maps, and then publish the map either on MapBuilder.net or their own website.

This is pretty neat and very simple. I think may bloggers will want to bookmark this site to add some functionality to their websites.