Moving into 2011: call for topics and ideas

Over the last five and a half years the blog here at VerySpatial.com has always been intended to be a support mechanism for our podcast. But as we start a new calendar year and a new half year of all things VerySpatial we have taken some time to contemplate what VerySpatial can be. To that end we have decided to move forward with three ideas which we need your help with.

  1. We are announcing an open call for blog contributors. We are looking for people who are involved with Geography and/or geospatial technologies in their daily lives to help us take the blog from a support role for A VerySpatial Podcast to a source of broad Geography content. I will post details on this open call on Thursday (Jan 13).
  2. An audience survey is being put together to get an idea of what you would like to see in terms of content, format, and schedule for the blog and podcast. It would be great if you would take a few minutes to respond to the survey when we roll it out at the beginning of February.
  3. Last year we organized a number of our podcast main topics and interviews around a theme (Time and Geography). This year, we wanted to continue with that idea, and are bringing you a new theme: Hazards. We plan to kick off the theme with a listener-requested discussion on flood mapping, but we want to know if you have any specific topics you would like us to discuss or people you would like us to talk to on the theme of hazards. Please email us or leave a comment on this post if you have any suggestions regarding the theme.

While the podcast is generally a well-oiled machine after 286 weekly episodes, we will be tweaking a few things as we head toward our 6th anniversary in July. A notable shift will be placing more content in the conference/roadshow feed or releasing special episodes for most conference content and bringing you more discussions and broader interviews on the weekly podcast.

We hope that we will find some great new contributors to help us in our efforts to bring you interesting information about the discipline, about the technologies we use every day, and about the bleeding edge of research, ideas, and technologies that will impact the way we approach Geography in the future.


3 Replies to “Moving into 2011: call for topics and ideas”

  1. Darren Smith

    Hi all,

    I was 25% of the audience at the 5th anniversary (tall slim guy from Australia with British accent who won 20 bucks!). I have had an idea for a slot on the show for a while, so here goes: Perhaps you could have a little section now and again for discussion on classic geospatial problems/hurdles relevant to spatial professionals and the like. For example, a while back I was tasked with finding a projection suitable for calculating the length of stream features across continental Australia.
    The way I saw it was that there were two issues to focus on here, with the first of course being the fundamental geospatial issue of distance being product of scale etc; and the second being that all equidistant projections seemed (at least from my research) to only be suitable when applied to small areas (i.e. definitely not suitable for continental Australia). Anyway, the best solution I found in the end was not a projection, but instead to use the Vincenty inverse formula (translated & adapted from the Javascript in this link to Python: http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong-vincenty.html) to calculate the geodesic distance between the vertices of a line and sum the distances.
    So guys, what do you think, a good idea for a section on the show? How about a shout out anyway? Keep up the good work and perhaps I’ll see you at the 6th anniversary (I certainly hope there’s cake this time ;-)).

    Kind regards,

    Darren Smith

  2. Jesse

    Darren,

    That is a great idea for an occasional section. Thanks for the idea and we will be sure to bring the cake this year!

    Jesse

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