Link – Yahoo Maps… First Look
I’ve always been quite impressed with the Geobloggers map built using the Google Maps API, but the new mashup using the Yahoo! Maps API really has some “WOW” built into it. I’ve been of the mind that there isn’t anything that Yahoo!, Microsoft or ESRI can do to get people to move off of the Google API, but my mind is changing.
I just got this email in response to my email asking where the promised response to my technical issue was:
Our support department is currently experiencing a high call volume and this, in turn, is causing a delay in our response time. You can expect an analyst to contact you by phone or e-mail within the next three to five business days.
We are working hard to reduce our queue wait time. We anticipate hiring 5-10 additional staff over the next 45 days to help alleviate this problem. Your business is important to us and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
We ask that you do not escalate the incident unless it becomes an emergency and the response time does not meet your needs. If you decide to escalate this incident, please respond providing the reason it has become an emergency.
3-5 business days? Of course it might have been nice to have gotten that email when I first sent in my request. I guess I’ll just reinstall ArcInfo to see if that fixes the problem.
I’ve made a pretty big change over on Planet Geospatial, but not one I’ve been talking about (I still need to buckle down and get mxTidy installed to fix that). Rather than full text RSS feeds, Planet Geospatial now only shows excerpts from the feeds, irrespective if the site offers full text or no. Both RSS feeds also only offer excerpts, rather than full text.
I did this for two reasons. First I think if you enjoy an article, you should “click through” and view the article, rather than just read it on the front page of Planet Geospatial. Nothing has changed, other than only the first 500 characters on each post is now displayed. The RSS Feeds also only offer the first 500 characters, but as with the website, you just have to click on the title to view the whole post. Second the page was getting way to long. Many of the posts were pages of code, which might be enjoyable to some programmers, but I think it got in the way of readability for the page.
My to-do list still includes integrating mxTidy and I’ll try and get that done soon, but the page already looks much better than before.
I’ve been having loads of trouble with Atom RSS feeds from Blogger on Planet Geospatial. I’m beginning to run out of ideas to fix them (though I’m going to try and fix it with mxTidy tonight or later this week). The feeds validate, but the HTML that is generated by the WYSIWYG editor in blogger is horrible, so when I display them they screw up the whole page. We’ll see what I can do to fix this, but the only other solution is to remove feeds that cause this. I’ve been able to replicate this using Blogger, but TypePad doesn’t seem to have this problem. The best thing bloggers can do is not use any WYSIWYG editors and just type it all into notepad.
Link – Google Earth vs. ArcGIS Explorer
As tired as some are of all the ArcGIS Explorer noise they have been hearing, it isn’t even a dent into the amount of Google Earth posts. This just shows that ESRI doesn’t have a hill to climb, but a mountain. In fact beyond a few blogs in our little GIS circle, not a peep has shown up on more mainstream blogs and sites. Most of the non-stop spin we saw was just repeating of the same stories. Matt Waite saw it and called it the “GIS geek world echo chamber” and what a small echo chamber it is.
Link – SQL for Geographers
This blog is dedicated to the integration between GIS and enterprise level relational databases. I am a Geographer by trade with a strong interest in relational databases. I have been in the GIS field for 10+ years and the database field for 7. The amount of data waiting to be spatially enabled within enterprise databases is extraordinary. I hope to show in this blog working examples of database-GIS interaction. Many examples that I will show are implemented within Oracle 9.2 and ESRI’s SDE 8.3. Hopefully most of the SQL algorithms will transfer to your implementation.
Jeremy over at Mapdex has let us know about a new blog he’s put together about GIS and relational databases. He’s already posted twice and if these entries are any indication it will be a real treat. Great job Jeremy!
I’ll admit it, my company uses ArcPublisher quite a but internally and externally with clients. Internally we use ArcSDE to share data and externally we use ArcIMS (with ArcSDE) to share data. Its worked pretty well over the past 2 years, but at over 100 megabytes it is a beast to download. Now with ArcGIS Explorer (and its svelte 15 meg download) will there be export of ArcMap documents? Or will there be a save to ArcGIS Explorer right from ArcMap rendering Publisher dead? Basically I have no problem continuing to pay maintenance on Publisher if it allows me to share MXDs with just about anyone, but this whole ArcGIS Explorer support of many formats really raises some questions.
So many questions to be answered and not much news from Redlands. We will continue our use of ArcPublisher and beta testing of Arc2Earth.
Link – WMS Connect 1.0.0
So the question comes to mind on why would you need such a tool? The core ArcGIS WMS extension is great for quickly visualizing services within the ArcGIS framework. However, it doesn’t natively allow users to modify the WMS map requests and it does require an existent Internet connection.
The WMS Connect tool allows the user to modify WMS service requests in such a way that the user can select a style other than the default, it allows the user to define the request area, and it allows the definition of the downloaded cell size. The result of this tool is a raster dataset on disk and the user can use it in a disconnected environment and for geoprocessing as well.
I’m going to have to try this when I get back into work on Monday. Better WMS support in ArcGIS has been a hot topic with some of our clients.
Link – GMaps API data quality deteriorating?
the basemap data you get via the API is only from TeleAtlas, but if you look at the maps through Google’s branded gateway, they are enhanced with NavTech data too. As rich pointed out, there’s a long discussion about this on the Google Maps API Google Group, or Usenet group as it was once known.
We heard a little bit about this a couple weeks ago. I’ve been saying since day one that the problem with a free API for web mapping is that you need to either reduce your costs as low as possible or have another revenue stream (advertisements). One of the biggest arguments for a paid service like ArcWeb is that you get a great choice of data. We’ve already seen that the satellite imagery in ArcWeb is much better than Google Maps and that I don’t think people mind paying for a service if the quality is better.
Conspiracy theories fly! Do people really care enough about very high quality base maps to pay for a premium API service? Or are geodata licensing costs driving this decision on the part of GMaps? If quality of service continues to deteriorate, will this provide a boon to collaborative mapping in the land of the free geodata, augmenting the accuracy and currency that Google’s maps may be losing?
So there is an opportunity for ArcWeb 2005. The question is how soon will it be to we here/see it (with a name like ArcWeb 2005, you’d think we’d see it soon). I’ll tell you this, as soon as the new ArcWeb 200X is out, I’m going to replace my blog map with it.
