In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Probably because of its unusual size, last Friday's newsletter did not reach all subscribers. Here are the stories published last Friday:

• Google Geonews: Analytics for Google Maps API for Business, Snapping in Panoramio, Titanic in Google Earth, Zombie Survival Map, and much more
• Ten Things You Need to Know About OpenStreetMap and SofM 2012 Registration
• FOSS4G - North America 2012: Summary for Day 1 and General Notes
• FOSS4G - North America 2012: Summary for Day 2
• FOSS4G - North America 2012: Summary for Day 3 and Other Summaries

I'm glad to announce that Slashgeo is a proud media partner of the first FOSS4G - North America 2012 conference. We certainly have experience with these after having participated to the previous three FOSS4G conferences. We'll provide on-site coverage of the event and share with our users any pertinent related news. We already mentioned FOSS4G-NA 2012 a few times and here's how the about page presents it:

"FOSS4G conferences highlight the latest and greatest projects from the Open Source Geospatial foundation OSGeo.  This year’s program targets a range of interests with the following tracks:

• Technology & Tips Track: Learn about the latest open source software from the developers and power users themselves. What are the new features? How do you get the best performance? How do you configure for the best results? For power users, deployers, system integrators and developers!
• Deployment & Decisions Track: Learn who is using open source geospatial software, and what their experiences have been. What kinds of organizations are deploying? What scale are their systems? What were the business drivers behind their plans? For managers, project leads, consultants, and other decision makers!
• Ideas & Trends Track: Where the latest tastes meet and mingle! Open data and crowd-sourcing, balloon photography, personal sensor packages and hardware hacking. For everyone with an itch to scratch!

Over 900 international attendees came together for FOSS4G 2011 in Denver. The event fostered new ideas and enthusiasm to build great things. Join us in Washington, DC this spring to make magic again!"

A quick note to let you know that Slashgeo is a proud media partner of the Location Business Summit Europe 2012. Thus the vertical banner on the left-hand column of the site.

We already announced the LBS Europe 2012 event last month, and here's the summary of the summary: "The 3rd annual Location Business Summit Europe, to be held in May 22-23 2012 in Amsterdam, is the biggest meeting place for hands on knowledge and networking within the mobile and location industry. Following our blockbuster events in Silicon Valley and Amsterdam last year, the biggest and best companies in the community will come together at the most influential LBS focused summit in the world."

Our server host had major issues the past few days. This downtime was entirely out of our control. The good news, Slashgeo.org is now back online and will resume geonews aggregation pretty soon. Thank you for your comprehension. Alex for Slashgeo

I am extremely happy to report that Safe Software, the makers of the popular FME spatial ETL tool, have made a big donation to Slashgeo.org - thank you Safe Software! They're taking the sweet spot of being #1 on our top donors list (on the right-hand column).

Here's what might interest you regarding FME 2012:

• Contest called "Geography Jones and the Temple of Data", open until Friday which has prizes like an iPad2 and $1500 in travel up for grabs
• Webinar that will describe what's new and great in FME 2012, offered three times on January 26
• Details on what's new in FME Desktop and FME Server
• Blog posts on FME 2012, LiDAR, Google Fusion Tables and more to come later this week

We mentioned FME several times since 2006. In addition to this donation, Safe Software also paid for advertising exclusivity on Slashgeo.org for a few months (the top banner). Slashgeo is managed by a registered non-profit organization. You can learn more about getting exposure on Slashgeo.

Don't worry, we're not filthy rich now ;-) Despite this welcomed donation, our budget is still far in the red because of hosting and maintenance fees accumulated since 2005 (this doesn't count hundreds of hours spent by our team of volunteers). You can peak at our open budget while it's still there. I'll have to remove it in order to respect the Google terms of service (we already got trouble with them in the past).

Dear users, a short note to let you know I'll be unavailable (and away from computers!) for the next 10 days. Geonews aggregation will resume on the week of January 23rd. I had the intention of publishing more this week, but good intentions are sometimes not enough. Rest reassured, I will include everything pertinent that I accumulated and which was published during the past weeks. Meanwhile, you can still contribute stories that other editors will handle. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

It's that time of the year again. We just got past November 13th, which three years ago I audaciously declared the "MSKC Day", 'Make Slashgeo Known to the Community' Day. Your mission is still the same: 

If you like the site and find it useful, you must tell one of your colleagues about Slashgeo.org. With enough missions accomplished, you'll gain experience, level up and be able to develop new geospatial skills ;-)

Things you most probably already know: we're managed by a registered non-profit organization and powered by passion for the geospatial community. Your contributions are more than welcomed.

What's new recently? Like Google Maps, Slashgeo has its own Google Plus Page now. While you can add us to your "circles" if you have a Google Plus account, Slashgeo's posts are not published on Google+ yet. But they are on our Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Already 6 years of Slashgeo today! Geospatial changed so much since 2005 and we can only expect, like too many other things, it's going to continue to evolve at an exponential rate. How to stay in touch with everything important that's going on in geospatial? Slashgeo.org! Well, that's at least our mission ;-)

We finally moved to Drupal a bit over a year ago, and while the site is arguably several zoom factors better from what it was, there's still a lot to do (there always is, right? ;-). And we're still facing the same challenges as last year, namely resources and community participation. We're always listening if you have ideas or proposals - and warmly welcome new editors.

With today's Facebook and Google+, I'm wondering if a site such as this one is the best vehicle to share geospatial news with the community for the coming years. What do you think?

And since anniversaries are opportunities for stats, here's some: we're now at 5,157 stories published in our 6 years of existence, we have 6,866 unique RSS subscribers according to Google Feedburner (that's a lot!), 859 new registered users since last year's "reboot", amongst which 610 receive our daily newsletter by email, and of course thousands of direct visitors to the website. We were also present on-site at 4 geospatial conferences this year: Where 2.0 2011, State of the Map 2011, FOSS4G 2011 and two Slashgeo editors will be at Géomatique 2011 in two weeks.

Let's find out what surprises the future is hiding for Slashgeo's 6th year :-)
-- Alex, aka Satri

A quick note to let you know I'll be away until September 6th, with rare sporadic access to Internet. Expect less geonews until then. Other editors will still take care of the site and moderate your submissions. As usual, I'll catch up on my return and share anything worthy to ensure you haven't missed any important geonews. See you soon!

I'm glad to announce Slashgeo.org will be a media partner with the State of the Map 2011 conference.

"The State of the Map is the world’s leading OpenStreetMap community event. Join participants from all around the world in Denver, Colorado, USA from September 9th – 11th to hear talks, participate in workshops and hang out with OpenStreetMappers from around the world. If you are involved with any aspect of OpenStreetMap from mapping to coding to campaigning, or if you want to hear more from the global mapping movement that is changing the way maps are made and used, the State of the Map is for you!"

Today's importance of OpenStreetMap has been demonstrated numerous times, to the extent that MapQuest is using OpenStreetMap and Microsoft too, they even hired OpenStreetMap's founder. Only Google resists for the time being, probably because they favor Google Map Maker. Slashgeo mentioned OpenStreetMap hundreds of times in the past 6 years.

The State of the Map 2011 conference takes place just before FOSS4G 2011, where Slashgeo will also have an editor on the site.