In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

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.

I've been recently able to implement a few improvements to the user interface of the site.

• You can now share individual geonews directly by email, that's the little envelope at the bottom of every geonews
• You can also use 'Google +1' for individual stories, that the blue +1 button at the bottom of every geonews. A Google account is required
• While the 'Daily Geonews Newsletter' has been there since 2005, you can now get the 'Geospatial Press Releases' by email. These instructions have been added to the slightly updated 'Using this site' page
• For user sharing comments and submitting geonews, a new WYSIWYG editor has been installed and is much less confusing than the previous one. It also fixes the missing linebreaks in the daily newsletter which reappeared lately
• Some users trying to submit content fail to pass our spam filter. If you have such a problem, contact us, I have a permanent solution for you
• We also removed the ability to "Watch" geonews from the front page and from the RSS feed. You won't be getting '404 Not Found' errors from the RSS feed anymore. This feature is still present in individual geonews pages

If you have comments or suggestions, don't hesitate! This site is for all of us after all! :-) Next step (no deadlines) is to improve the look of the site itself.

I also take the opportunity to mention The Map Room blog is going in prolonged hiatus. "TMR" has been an excellent source of geonews, too bad the community is losing him. This of course made me think about Slashgeo's own future. Similarly to TMR's Jonathan, this Slashgeo project had and is still having a significant negative impact on other personal projects I have. While arguably successful, Slashgeo.org has not yet become a tool for the geospatial community by the geospatial community. Will it become so? The future will tell us! Want to contribute to this adventure? Just drop me a line.

Most of you know that Slashgeo.org is managed by a team of volunteers under the umbrella of a registered non-profit organization. We aim to provide great geonews aggregation and discussion services, from the geospatial community for the geospatial community. While making billions is clearly not a goal, it would still be nice if the site was self-sufficient. Over our past 5.5 years of existence, we always favored transparency. That's why we provide our open budget. Yes, we're in the red. If you like the site, any donation is welcomed, even if it's just 5$ to help pay for the hosting fees.

I'll now need to update our open budget and our list of Top Donors, found on the right hand side of the site... I'm glad to report the guys at WebMapSolutions.com gave us a substantial donation which propel them to the 6th place of our all-time Top Donors. Thanks a lot WebMapSolutions! What they do? Their website indicates they "provide on time and on budget project programming & implementation, for custom developed rich internet map applications". Cheers!

Yesterday morning, a new 3D object panned into my field of view. Zooming to this 3D object with an hyperspectral sensor produces an array of +32,767 beautiful colors that saturate histograms and confuse most software. However, this 3D object is not fully compliant with perfection, it regularly generates memory leaks that creates unexpected brown and yellow layers. Processing the 3D object requires two multitasking CPUs (central parenting union) which need to REST regularly. The 3D object also needs to be frequently joined with a parent 3D object which has the corresponding primary key. This parent 3D object requires a predetermined front-facing topography with special attributes in order to fluidly extract, transfer and load vital content to the child 3D object. If the joining process fails, an audible error message is triggered and your location privacy will be difficult to control: your location will be loudly projected at a 20m buffer around you. Hopefully, this new 3D object respects most OGC (organic genuine compound) standards. You can also easily interact with the 3D object using a touch interface. Once you wake it from sleep, it automatically animates in infinite loops until the battery runs out. While this 3D object comes from a proprietary source, its creators are confident it will become more and more open and will probably, after about 20 years of active development, want to become more and more interoperable and will ultimately intersect with a 3D object of the opposite geometry type. That's how wonderful our spatial lives are.

In other words, my wife gave birth to our second daughter. It happened yesterday morning at home and everybody is in superb shape. For Slashgeo, it means we'll be in "slow news mode" for the next few weeks. Rest reassured, you will not miss a single important geonews, you might just get them a little late and get more of them in batches instead of individual stories. Meanwhile, you can always contribute by sharing pertinent geonews with the rest of the community (about 10,000 unique "3D objects" use Slashgeo every week ;-). Other Slashgeo editors will help take care of your submissions. Geonews aggregation will be resuming at full speed pretty soon, thanks for bearing with us. Cheers - Alex, aka Satri

One of the biggest geospatial conferences is O'Reilly Where 2.0, to take place in Santa Clara, CA, from April 19 to 21. If you're planning to attend you can benefit from our 25% discount code "whr11sla". There will be several featured speakers of importance for geospatial, including Jack Dangermond, founder of ESRI, and Marissa Mayer of Google.

This year again, Slashgeo is a proud media partner of the Where 2.0 conference. Landon, an experienced Slashgeo editor, will be on site and share coverage with our users.

This is how this major conference is described: "Leveraging Location -- Groupon, Facebook, Google, Foursquare + More / Now in it’s 7th year, the O'Reilly Where 2.0 is the premier conference for all things location-aware, exploring the intersection between location technologies and trends in software development, business strategies, and marketing. Happening April 19-21, 2011 in Santa Clara, CA, Where 2.0 will show you first hand how to leverage technologies like Groupon, Facebook, Foursquare, and Yelp as part of your marketing and advertising mix. The dynamic mix of speakers will bring you the latest on how to use location to identify, understand, and better serve your customers. To see the list of speakers and sessions, and to register, visit: http://where2conf.com"