Four short links: 17 August 2009

1. How Twitter Works in Theory (Kevin Marks) -- very nice summary about the conceptual properties of Twitter that let it work. Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you're looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you're declaring an emotion and expecting a human response. This is what leads to unintentionally ironic newspaper columns bemoaning public banality, because they miss that while you don't care what random strangers feel about their lunch, you do if its your friend on holiday in Pompeii.
2. Army To Test Wiki-Style Changes to The 7 Manuals -- In early July the Army will conduct a 90-day online test using seven existing manuals that every soldier, from private to general officer, will have the opportunity to read and modify in a “wiki”-style environment. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. MobWrite -- converts forms and web applications into collaborative environments. Create a simple single-user system, add one line of JavaScript, and instantly get a collaborative system. (via Simon Willison)
4. Open Data Standards Don't Apply To The Military -- It’s that last particular point that should be the most disturbing to the administration. Apparently all geospatial data being developed and utilized by the USAFA would be unusable without a sole software vendor. This causes concern over broader interoperability with other agencies and organizations, access to important national information, and archivability and retrievability. Expose of the single-source "standard" vendor lockin in US military geosoftware and geodata. (via johnmscott on Twitter)

Jack Dangermond Interview 3 of 3: The Geoweb

Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI's software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI's influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history of GIS and online mapping.

Jack will be speaking at Where 2.0 on May 20th in San Jose. You can use whr09rdr for 20% off at registration.

Brady Forrest: What do you think will be coming in the next couple of years that will make the geoweb a reality?

Jack Dangermond: I think the geoweb is a reality. It's just a matter of how you define it I guess. There's just millions of pieces of content now available on the web for either FTP download and use in GIS or other analytic tools or as services that people are accessing by way of open systems. So I'd say maybe more analytic services that are available on the web or developers who take the foundations of technology as they exist today and build applications to them. But there's got to be motivation. There has to be a commercial incentive for people like young developers to build applications on the web with web services. And maybe there has to be a marketplace created. I'm speculating here. I don't have a clear answer for you on that.

Brady Forrest: You guys did have a marketplace for a little while, did you not?

Jack Dangermond: We do. We started with something called ArcWeb which was a little bit successful. It focused primarily on content and then developed an environment for people to build apps out of. But considering the cost of that compared to the kind of income that was coming in from it, it was not sustainable. Google and Microsoft's websites in some way displaced that because much of the content that was there was free and it was much bigger. From what I've been told, somewhere between $75 and $100 million a year is spent on that content basemap to maintain it and serve it. That's not sustainable if we're talking about small developers. So we sort of shut ArcWeb down effectively. I mean we still have a few users that are using it, but it's not something that sustains itself. If you have search and advertising revenue coming in, then you can afford to -- as Google and Microsoft do, you can then afford to subsidize a lot of that content. But you can't do it as an independent. So our second stage is --

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Jack Dangermond Interview 2 of 3: Sharing Government GIS Data

Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI's software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI's influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history of GIS and online mapping.

Jack will be speaking at Where 2.0 on May 20th in San Jose. You can use whr09rdr for 20% off at registration.

Brady Forrest: Thank you. I want to look back in history a bit. Last summer you made an announcement at Where 2.0 with John Hankey that would enable ESRI customers to publish to the web more easily. I was wondering what type of uptake you'd seen in that.

Jack Dangermond: We've had a lot of people that are putting their datasets out in the form of KML and loading it up onto Google Earth. I would've guessed that more would've happened than actually happened, but technologically now there's no limit to doing it. And I don't know why it hasn't been as popular as we would've wanted. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Brady Forrest: Fear of making data more available, either from a keeping my job standpoint or for a fear about terrorism. And just poor awareness of doing it. Why they would do it. What would be the positive benefits for them? As Ian White has pointed out before, people are paid to maintain that data. And if it doesn't go through them personally and it's just off the web, they're not as important as they were before or they don't perceive themselves to be as important.

Jack Dangermond: I actually haven't seen any of that. From the very earliest days, GIS was all about sharing data. And so USGS shared their topographic basemaps. And they became the basis for state and local government GIS's. And the ability to share planning data within engineering departments within agencies certainly wasn't restricted. In the early days, we're talking about 1995, '96, '97, we came out with a product called ArcIMS which was one of the first commercial versions of web mapping. And we sold over 50,000 copies of that server. So people were serving up parcel data, serving up land use maps, serving up demographic maps all over the web. And that's a pretty remarkable result of that. So contrary to that notion that GIS people don't share their data -- in fact, I'm absolutely certain that that's not the case.

Okay. There are a couple of agencies here and there that have been restrictive about sharing their property data. And the reason why they've done that is for commercial reasons and almost Machiavellian reasons like they get revenue for selling their property data and, therefore, they don’t want to make it available openly.

And there's even been some court cases on that in California. And that's sort of slowly working its way out. Today, I think there's only two counties left in the state of California, and it's probably been replicated across the country where people don't openly share their data on any kind of request. The three big reasons --

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Jack Dangermond Interview 1 of 3: Web Mapping

Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI's software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI's influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history of GIS and online mapping.

Jack will be speaking at Where 2.0 on May 20th in San Jose. You can use whr09rdr for 20% off at registration.

Brady Forrest: So ESRI is known for creating large enterprise GIS applications. And then a couple of years ago, maps came into the hand of just about anybody through Google Maps. One question -- I asked people for questions for you, and I think my favorite one was: Do you think that the explosion of web-based mapping has just filled the world with ugly and poorly designed maps?

Jack Dangermond: That's an interesting and compelling question. I think what the consumer mapping sort of technologies have done is provided geo-awareness to everybody. And they've done it principally by building a standardized basemap for the planet. And Google has been, obviously, the leader in this. But also, Microsoft is making a lot of contributions in the same space. And that allows me to navigate and understand a kind of electronic map or image so I can sort of see things. And that's pretty powerful actually for just spatial awareness and georeferencing people's minds about what's going on at different locations. In the last couple of years, I've seen a lot of VGI or volunteer geographic information added to it, little dots on maps. And that allows people to participate in these websites and share their knowledge in some kind of a collaborative space. And that's emerging quite nicely.

But my field is really in geographic information systems. And while we do have a lot of large users, like you said, the history on it has been a little different. It started basically as a university and, I guess, frontier area where people were playing around with computerized mapping for doing spatial analysis. And it started really on mainframes and then went to minicomputers and workstations. And where it really found its way was on the PC. So my judgment is that there's at least a few million users that are in the business of creating maps or creating spatial analysis and then using them for real applications like sighting or like environmental analysis or healthcare studies or land use planning, that sort of thing. The explosion that happened on the web was sort of with the invention of putting maps on the web for many people to look at. And the big popular ones were way back in the time of -- I say way back, but it's in the time of MapQuest when they became really popular, that notion of navigating and seeing. The actual basemaps of Google and Microsoft are less about creating new authored maps than they are about visualizing stuff on top of the basemap. GIS actually has a little bit of an interesting culture because there's lots of people that make really crazy maps in GIS on their desktop or now increasingly on the web. They mix colors wrong. They do color palettes incorrectly. They mix symbologies incorrectly. And in the mashup, it's just exemplified. If that's what you're thinking about the web is just exemplified people making crazy stories and mixing relationships, yeah, probably right. There's bad cartography out there.

What I'm interested in is that a few people who are really talented and special can build templates for cartography that other people can use. I like to think of it as sharing geographic knowledge. So in the early years, people shared geographic data. You know, my layer and your layer and they could combine them and so on. What I'm seeing now is the ability to share a cartographic template. Like here's a wonderful color ramp that you use for demographic data. Or here's a standardized template for how you display cartography to create a basemap or a utility template or, you know, like that.

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