GlobeXplorer Acquires AirPhotoUSA via PubSub
Wow, I know these two had announced a “strategic” agreement back in January so I guess that was the start of something. This probably makes sense in that it strengthens GlobeXplorer in the United States, but I’m a little sad to see a local company get bought.
Link – Virtual Earth Competition
Show off your creativity, sharpen your coding skills and you could win $1000! Enter the Virtual Earth contest by developing your own “map app” using the Virtual Earth JScript map control and API. Then submit your entry before October 14, 2005. The prizes are: Microsoft Streets & Trips 2005 with GPS for the first 25 entries received, $1000 cash for the best entry, in the opinion of our judges
I wonder if I should send in my Virtual Earth “app”? Hmm, might lose out on some of that “sexy” required component.
While I can’t believe it, many people aren’t totally on the RSS bandwagon. I’ve gotten a couple emails from people wondering if there would ever be a weekly email summarizing the weeks news from me. I kind of thought about it (it wouldn’t be hard to do with Movable Type), but then I realized that the news wouldn’t be too timely as much can change in the course of a week. A couple weeks ago I started giving people the option to subscribe to individual entries so I wondered how hard it would be to allow people to subscribe to the whole site. It turns out it was much easier than I thought. Now right below the RSS feed button on the right sidebar, you’ll now see a place to subscribe to the site via email. Whenever I post a new entry, you’ll get an email right in your inbox right away with all the details. If you ever decide you don’t want the emails anymore, just click the unsubscribe button and you’ll be free.
Link – An Interview with Frank Warmerdam
Howard interviews Frank Warmerdam who is probably best known for GDAL but is involved with many open source GIS projects. If you are interested in a kind of behind the scenes look of open source projects you’ll want to listen.
Link – Very Spatial Podcast Episode 08
The latest Very Spatial Podcast looks at space and place, Microsoft supporting spatial developers, new MapInfo deemed OGC compliant, and GSDI Small Grants.
Link – Quantum GIS Current Release
I just noticed that Quantum GIS (QGIS) is now up to version 0.7. For those who don’t know much about QGIS, it is an Open Source GIS (licensed under the GNU Public License) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows. QGIS supports vector, raster, and many database formats. I am quite impressed at how far this project has come and it continues to grow. If you have a Macintosh or prefer Linux, this is definitely your best way to go. I’ve used it at home for quite some time now on personal projects.
I’m just amazed at how this blog has really taken off during the past 3 months. In that time the traffic has soared and in turn advertisers have begun to take notice, much to my chagrin. I got an email from one who wanted to buy some banner ads on my site. He sent me some graphs showing me how popular the site has become in relationship to existing GIS or mapping blogs.
First of all, to compare this site to The Map Room is laughable. Anyone who pays any attention to the internet knows that Jonathan’s site is cited by more users than almost any other GIS or mapping website out there. Plus anyone looking at that graph the advertiser sent me can see that The Map Room has had high traffic levels for much longer than I have (6 months to a year). I think he added that graph in there to make me feel better about the site.
AllPointsBlog is a little different, but I’d guess they are still much larger than this one. Something happened to the site when they changed their URL. Somehow it became less compelling than before, but maybe they are still trying to figure out what the blog should be. On top of that, changing their URL probably affected the results. This blog compared to Directions Magazine probably shows a more accurate picture of AllPointsBlog.
I’ll say here what I told this advertiser, I view this blog as a hobby, not a source of income. His choice of graphs, using Alexa and the time period he picked was all part of a plan for him to try and make money off of my site with ad. The whole advertising thing is suspect anyway. When I was involved with previous sites, they would always give good reviews to big advertisers and I got so sick and tired of it I left and created Spatially Adjusted. (I’m not saying every site that accepts ads has an agenda by any means)
The cost of this site to me is very low (I pay about $5 a month for hosting and my copy of Movable Type was paid for over a year ago). I don’t like ads on websites (I block most of them using FireFox anyway) so I’ll never have them here in any capacity. I also will always have full RSS feeds so you don’t have to even visit my site if you don’t want to. Also by the end of the week I’ll have an email subscription set up so you can follow the news via email if you don’t like RSS.
Oh, MapInfo better watch out because I’m about to pass them in traffic! (rolleyes)
Link – Katrina GIS support
I am participating in a fantastic, grass roots GIS project. We are working to serve as much Katrina imagery as we can, reprocessing it to make fit and look better, and providing access in as many formats as possible.
Howard is part of a wonderful effort to provide imagery of the Katrina Hurricane disaster in as many formats as possible. If you think you can help out go ahead and email him at and let him know what your skills or ideas are. You can see the effort at the Katrina Image Warehouse.
I posted back a couple weeks ago that I changed the RSS feed from FeedBurner to hosting my own. This was supposed to be seamless, but it seems like some readers are not grabbing the new feed url. I know Thunderbird is having trouble with it so if you use it, make sure you update your feed url to the following. Sorry about all this, but FeedBurner wasn’t updating all the time even though I was pinging it. I promise it won’t change again.
Link – Talking about ArcScripts
There are some good suggestions in the comments on Brian’s blog. I think the consensus is that we need a place to collaborate. I like Richie’s idea to require source code for all projects uploaded, there are tons of other places to advertise your extensions rather than ArcScripts. Make any suggestions in Brian’s blog.
Grab my latest OPML files for both GIS bloggers and ESRI bloggers. If you use a RSS reader, you can just import these (the help file of your reader should tell you how) and have all the blogs that I read. Enjoy.
I updated the OPML files, hopefully they are valid this time