Is your portion of the night sky polluted by artificial light? Check out this really slick Google Map interface I found on the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) web site . For over 22 years, the IDA has been advocating to keep our night sky clean of light pollution. Their reasons go beyond astronomy purposes and [...]
Adobe announced today they are killing development of a mobile flash player. Is this the death call for flash? Maybe not, but it certainly is a serious blow. We all know the mobile platform is growing at a phenomenal rate and it’s hard for IT departments to contemplate new development that doesn’t include mobile platforms. [...]
Flickr has added a pretty cool new feature to their API set – Geofences. The idea is based upon the increasing concern over privacy, particularly spatial privacy. In the past versions of the API, one could only make the spatial location available to all or hide it from all. Geofences adds the ability to specify [...]
Esri UC 2011 Live Blog We’re about to get underway at the 2011 ESRI UC. We’re getting the opening Rocky-esque montage of GIS in action. Jack takes the stage and here we go! Jack starts with a big thank you and appreciation to us all and why we’re all here. Jack’s a big fan of [...]
At the ESRI Education User Conference Plenary this morning a few things struck me as significant for GIS use in the classroom. Bern Szukalski reviewed some of the ArcGIS.com revisions that occurred last Wednesday and these are what I thought could enhance the use of GIS in the classroom: Intelligent Mapping – Essentially pop ups [...]
The Globe and Mail has an interesting article today on a site called HealthMap, created by epidemiologists at the Children’s Hospital Boston which uses participatory GIS and other information mined from the Internet to quickly identify potential patterns of disease outbreaks. According to the HealthMap website partners and supporters include Google, NIH, CDC, Canadian Institute [...]
That’s a great quote from Google Maps product manager Manik Gupta! What led him to say such a thing is that Google is now opening their map to user input. Users will be able to edit the map to make it better. They’ve already launched the tool in 183 countries who do not have an [...]
I came across an interesting demo video on YouTube today for a web-based analytics tool named Bime. While I haven’t had a chance to sit down and delve into the web app it seems to offer quite a few geo friendly tools including recognizing geographic data and the ability to create visualizations for both exploring [...]
Mapping social networks isn’t anything new, but I find this lovely map of Facebook users in the BBC to be incredibly striking. First, because it’s obviously beautiful. Second, because you can use it as a proxy for the digital divide. The map details connections between friends on Facebook with the bright points at the end [...]
Mashable (perhaps one of the cooler sites I visit each day) has a nifty story about an artist who drew Google Maps icons as if they existed in the real world. It’s rather interesting to think about these big push pins existing in real life, or a pop-up box over a building. Take away the [...]
