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How about this news? Zillow has released their neighborhood boundaries in ESRI Shapefile format for everyone to use.

Determining boundary data was quite a feat, as currently this information isn’t readily available through a single public source. Thus, we determined these on our own through various tactics, including calling individual chambers of commerce, tourism and convention boards, speaking with real estate agents and community members in these areas, as well as using available online local sources.

Plus they are asking your help in updating the ones they created or add new ones where they didn’t exist before.

If your city is not one of the 150 cities covered currently, and you know enough GIS (or have access to someone who does), you can draw your own boundaries for your city and notify us by posting a thread in Zillow Discussions. We’ll add them to the database of neighborhoods available for download and will work to eventually integrate them into Zillow.

Giving data back to the community at the same time asking for help is a wonderful way to get people involved with creating their neighborhood boundaries. Plus you can use their Zillow API in your own applications. I’ve been involved with a couple projects in the last 6 months where neighborhood boundaries are very important and had nothing to do with real estate.

Dave Bouwman just wrote up his findings on bringing ArcGIS Server web service (using the WMS service and SOAP API) into Virtual Earth. Another great example of using a hosted web service with your existing GIS projects.

I’m pretty sure the ESRI Developer Summit will be full of folks wanting to know about using Virtual Earth in their ESRI web applications and doing it outside of the Web ADF. The REST API cannot come soon enough IMO for those who develop using the ESRI platform.

If you are lucky enough to be running ArcGIS 9.x, you’ll be able to use the latest extension for ArcGIS Desktop ArcCow from ArcScripts from here. The source code is included so if I were you I’d port the thing to to the ArcGIS Server Task Framework and enjoy the $15,000 grand prize.

Bored? Try ArcCow.

Author assumes no liability for loss or damages that might be incurred when using or attempting to use ArcCow, such as but not limited to, hysteria, uncontrollable laughter, falling out of your chair from laughing, etc…

I can confirm that it works on 9.2 and had a great time dropping cow pies on the I-10 in Redlands.

Click to view ArcCow in all its glory

Actually all it does is put cow pies where you click with a “moooo” sound. So you might get board of it very quick, I sure did.

I’m frankly astounded at that prize. Last year had some nice ones, but this is quite a step up from a GPS unit or an Xbox 360. Better get coding because it will take more than a Flickr task to get that money.

1. First Place – $15,000
2. Second Place – $7,500
3. Third Place – $5,000

Three people today have told me that the conference rate at Hilton Hotel is sold out (rooms are available, but they run about $300/night) and the Wyndam hotel is essentially sold out (only single nights are available) for both the Business Partner Conference and the Developer Summit. So if you want to attend either, you are on your own. Best of luck!

No room at the inn for weary ArcObjects developers

UPDATE: Rooms might be available at the Hilton now. YMMV

Alex Barnett of Bungee Labs took a look at 8 Trends in Software as a Service Platform which highlights some of the movement toward web services moving forward. This ties in nicely with what I was saying last week and what Paul Bissett also hit on.

The ProgrammableWeb blog also looked at all the mashups in their directory and came up with a pie chart listing their API of choice. Mapping APIs are quite popular (which I think must of us would have expected)

Now the ProgrammableWeb directory is by no means complete, but the sheer number of mapping APIs really shows that there is demand for geo web services.

Let me take a step back here and say this. I still don’t see desktop GIS being replaced by web services anytime soon. There is just too much lifting that needs to be done to even think about doing that and even many web mapping sites would be better served by rolling your own ArcGIS Server, MapServer, MapDotNet Server, GeoServer, etc than subscribing to ArcWeb, deCarta or GYM. But even those who go the whole 9 yards and throw up ArcGIS Server Advanced Enterprise are looking at using a web service to augment their own datasets. Heck even ESRI ArcGIS Desktop users are gearing up to integrate web services into their work flows.

Paul Bissett of WeoGeo has some thoughts about web services and the changes in our industry.

The future of GIS, geo-content, geo-entertainment, etc. will belong to those who can think outside of the traditional methods of production and product delivery.

I couldn’t say that better myself.

I spent most of the afternoon talking with folks about web mapping systems and how to choose a direction to go. What is painfully obvious when you start laying out the different frameworks, APIs and servers is that there is just no clear answer as to what system to pick. When it comes down to it, what you are really after isn’t the system itself, but the product the system produces.

I think we need a taller pole

I talked a little about the different marketing direction I was taking last month, and this is partly it. It isn’t so much as abandoning one product for another as some had written in the comments, but more looking at the systems as a whole. Web services are web services, no matter if it is ESRI, Google, MapServer or even Manifold running the server. There is one constant that I’ve noticed in the past 2 years is that the server behind the product has very little to do with the quality of the product users see. You see users don’t care that it is Google, .NET, open source or even Manifold. They just want their experience to be useful.

Of course you may say it is easy to sit back and not worry about servers when you are in a IT structure that may dictate that you go one route or another. That is a huge reality in the for many implementors but it shouldn’t stop you from focusing on the end product and not on the server.

As I was on the airplane flying to New Orleans this morning I was thinking about where GIS application developers would be in the next 2 years.

Hosted Web Services

Now don’t start flaming me yet. I do realize that hosted web services aren’t possible for everyone or even wanted. But as this space grows beyond the traditional users of GIS, you’ll start seeing organizations wanting to get the power of maps with their products, but not have to worry about hardware, software or datasets. We’ve seen this with so many companies using Google Maps and Virtual Earth in basic web applications, but with the development of GeoJSON I think we are going to see much more integration of hosted web map services with existing business models.

Hosted web services is just the logical next step when you are not interested in the server itself, but the services that it provides. We’ve seen tons of innovation in the Amazon Web Services space so we probably need to keep one eye out there as well. I’m interested to see how this all plays out.

On Friday the Google Summer of Code Blog posted very interesting news about touchEarth created by Pawel Solyga.

touchEarth, an application he developed that allows you to control Google Earth using two finger gestures on multi-touch table. touchEarth uses the Google Earth COM API to control some of Google Earth’s features, while all the multi-touch screen events are sent to touchEarth from touchlib (or OpenTouch) using the TUIO protocol.

Most of us have seen these multi-touch interfaces before with the ESRI touch table but allowing Google Earth to be controlled this way will get this technology into more places. Of course I’m not exactly looking forward to everyone dragging their greasy hands across my MacBook Pro in a few years but coupled with that LG Touch LCD Screen we could be seeing some really interesting implementations moving forward.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90V7MaUyOwA&w=560&h=315]

Abe Gillespie has the great news on his blog, zigGIS 2.0 is officially announced.

Obtuse Software is proud to announce the upcoming release of zigGIS 2.0. For over two years zigGIS has enabled ArcView to view and analyze PostGIS layers. New to version 2.0 is the ability to edit PostGIS data as well as support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

Now all you folks who were unhappy that ESRI is charging for SQL Server 2008 access, now have an alternative avenue to view/edit SQL Server 2008 data. The questions I had seem to have been answered:

Obtuse Software releases zigGIS 2.0 sometime 2008 Q1. There is still much to be done so expect it later than sooner. Corporate licenses sell for $279 per seat. Personal and educational licenses are free. The source code will remain open.

So there you have it. View/edit both PostGIS and SQL Server 2008 right from ArcMap.