Blog

This week we had a great guest in Di-Ann Eisnor of Waze who was kind enough to join us right off stage from her talk at APPNATION. It was a great conversation about why Waze did what they did, how they’ve evolved, how crowdsourcing is improving their map, and how they see advertisers as the way to make their map better for their users (very interesting). Di-Ann was on WiFi at Moscone Center so the connection wasn’t great, but it is worth watching (it did clear up a bit later in the show).

You can watch the video anytime on the WeoGeo Video page (as well as the IRC log with a lot of questions and discussions) or see an archive of all the previous shows.

Tomorrow at 10am PDT my very good friend Di-Ann Eisnor of Waze joins us to talk about navigation, how Waze uses crowdsourcing, gamification, Carmageddon (both) and living in Apple’s and Google’s shadow.

We’ll be talking on the IRC channel again so either show up to the Hangout page on WeoGeo or better yet, point your IRC client to #hwjf on chat.freenode.net.

Earlier this week I was working on a map in TileMill and ran into an issue with a layer. At the time I couldn’t figure out which layer but Dane was good enough to help track it down. It ended up being an issue with the shapefile spec being vague and the Natural Earth shapefile being problematic. Mapnik and thus TileMill were not at fault, but the shapefile itself.

Shapefiles are used because they basically are the interchange file for GIS information. Others have tried with SpatiaLite and File Geodatabases, but neither has been accepted at large by the community. After spending half a day debugging my Carto for no reason, I’ve come to the conclusion that you must run ogr2ogr on every shapefile you share and every shapefile you consume.

ogr2ogr ne_rail_fixed.shp ne_10m_railroads.shp

Assume every Shapefile is corrupt and your life will be much easier. I’m going to move to KML personally.

KML is my new SHP

— James Fee (@cageyjames) December 7, 2012

Or as a very wise man puts it:

@cageyjames ogr2ogr this is the opposite of photocopy degradation 😉

— Nathaniel V. KELSO (@kelsosCorner) December 7, 2012

I’d like to thank everyone who has taken the time to donate to Planet Geospatal. I’m going to start the process of getting a CSS guru to take a look at the formatting and make it much easier (and quicker) to read.

This week was a fun hangout with my good friend Kate Chapman. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap is a wonderful project that has lots of opportunities to get involved. Kate also talked a bit about what it’s like to work in a developing country and how they are mapping locations around the world. Kate and the rest of the HOT project have worked their butts off and I’m glad to see things moving forward nicely. You can watch the video anytime on the WeoGeo Video page or see an archive of all the previous shows.

Next week’s guest is the one and only, Di-Ann Eisnor of Waze.

We’ve got a special hangout this week (take this opportunity to start playing the YouTube video below while you read). Kate Chapman, Acting Executive Director at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (H.O.T) joins us to talk about what HOT is, how it provides mapping services to humanitarian work around the world and how you can be involved. As always we go live tomorrow at 10 am PDT on the WeoGeo Video page.

We’ll be talking on the IRC channel again so either show up to the Hangout page on WeoGeo or better yet, point your IRC client to #hwjf on chat.freenode.net.

I’ve got the Planet Geospatial donation page up so you can now put your money where you mouth is. I’ve got my donation cardboard sign up so do what you must.

Gary Gale of Nokia joined us and we talked about Nokia HERE, OpenStreetMap, Nokia Community layer, 3D mapping, indoor mapping navigation, “non-car” related map content, and what he thinks is the future of mapping. The IRC log was full of comments as well so make sure you check that out too.

This week’s hangout is going to be great. Gary Gale of Nokia. Gary is a Director at Nokia and ex-Yahoo! Geo team member. Nokia has been in the news quite a bit the last few months with Amazon, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and others using their maps to power their applications. And just last week Nokia released Here Maps for iOS so there is surely something to talk about. We’ll also get into how Nokia views OpenStreetMap, developers, and maybe why people continue to favor Google Maps over some great competition. The fun starts at 10am PST over at WeoGeo Video.

We’ll be talking on the IRC channel again so either show up to the Hangout page on WeoGeo or better yet, point your IRC client to #hwjf on chat.freenode.net.

OK, so we talked it over and I think we’ve got a plan of action.

1. Planet Geospatial is going nowhere. I’m going to keep it running because so many people have told me how much they use it. The stats clearly showed this, but sometimes you just need to hear it from users.
2. Please send me additional feeds for the service. I’ve added probably 20 new blogs since last week and I’d love to add more. Curating good content requires the community to help. So email me what you enjoy reading so others can to.
3. I mentioned the CSS needed to be updated. You all see it as I do, these feeds are dirty and cause problems with the page formatting when it renders. I’m clearly not a CSS guru so I’d like to hire someone to make it much better. Some people have volunteered and I appreciate it, but I think we require some kick ass help. Thus I’m going to be smart and pay for a CSS stud to fix things the right way.
4. One of my concerns with spending time on improving Planet Geospatial was that I wasn’t sure how many people really valued it. I’ve gotten a ton of feedback on this but I think we should both put “skin in the game”. I’m going to set up a PayPal donation link here this week and whatever people donate will be put to improving Planet Geospatial. Based on feedback, there will be two options, a bulk donation option and a subscription option. There is no expectation that everyone donates. Clearly you need to determine if Planet Geospatial is of value to you and if so you still may not feel like donating. That’s ok, just keep reading and that’s enough. I only expect anyone to donate because they want to improve the service and keep it free and clean.

Thanks for the feedback everyone!