I have always liked maps. I would follow the Rand McNally road atlas maps as we drove across the U.S.s everal times before I was twelve. In school I liked to draw imaginary islands complete with coves and roads along the coast Usually there was a volcano inland, much like Montserrat. I would visit travel agencies and steamship lines and collect pamphlets and maps for tourists. I still have a collection of paper maps from decades ago.
So I was excited to receive a pass to the second OReilly where 2.0 conference which brings together developers, hackers, programmers, and large cartographic firms for a two day exchange of information and demonstrations of new geo-spatial applicaitions.
Monday evening May 28 there was an opening session called Ignite where about twenty five minute presentations were given followed by a chance to vote on your favorite one. There were already hundreds in the audience, and about 90 % were male attendees between 25-40.
Geocommons. Fortiusone launched this tonight. Behind each satellite image they saw a story, but it was hard to access. They felt a commons was needed for those without a GIS background.
hipoqih a Google map mashup that lets anyone follow you on the Internet as you walk with your GPS phone sending alerts that map to your route. From Galicia in Spain. Uses a PC or Nokia plugin. Linux coming soon. No word on the Mac.
30proof, Sonoma, California is working with Wild Sanctuary to put a huge collection of natural sounds recorded by Bernie Krause into a cartographic, place-based context.
Tagzania is place for the novice to make maps and share them through tagging. This is the route of an eastern migration of the monarch butterfly along with the sites they pass over.
fatdoor.com, Palo Alto, California You sign in with your address, and begin to get to know your neighbors. (Many in the audience did not; some did not want to know their neighbors!) Read the terms of service which are very restrictive in term of copyright, trademark, patents, and how they use what you provide in building your neighborhood. You receive no compensation. This does not look like a community network of yore.
Mapicurious is a personal mapping site for the map-averse. If friends ask you for recommendations, you can provide a map. One example here are BBQ joints in Atlanta.
dopplr.com is a site for linking up with other frequent travellers. Dan Gillmor seems to live in a planes and at airports, so his dance card was filled with friends and colleagues. Now to tag it with carbon footprints of the conference hoppers. By invitation.
San Francisco Tree Map is a project of Friends of the Urban Forest. They promote community based tree planting, youth programs of arboriculture and now cartography. The map shows the trees planted, and with a donation you can plant one over the Net.
OSGeo:
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation has been created to support and build the highest-quality open source geospatial software. The foundation's goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led projects.
David Troy of PopVox, Anapolis, Maryland, who had done some very neat mobile phone apps was back with twittervision and flickrvision. The former lets people watch the short text comments of mobile phone users all over the world. flickrvision zooms around the globe showing the location of recent flickr photos. I found the latter more interesting than "going into Starbucks" in twittervision. He will be rolling out more innovations in the coming months. David won the first round of voting which took place after more than half the demos had finished.
Bruce Daniel spoke about bad map design or cartographic anaesthesia. He called for more aesthetic design of maps and showed various examples of design that blended old techniques of shaded relief and local stylization. Cartifact labs.
Swivel aims to be the YouTube of data. they host huge data sets of all types and can render them into charts. Last night they introduced Swivel G which maps the data onto maps. Just out of the starting gate but looks quite useful. An interesting map of the top 13 countries for military spending .
Tuesday the conference kicks off at nine a.m. and runs for about twelve hours with a couple of birds of a feather sessions to wind down the event.
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