Paleotards speak again

If you missed Mark Bishop's presentation at the AGI GeoCommunity 08 there is another chance to hear him talking at the BCS Geospatial SIG event in London on Tuesday evening.

Operatic large women and enumerating young poultry

Firstly my appreciation to those of my friends and colleagues who did not suffer from the mistaken belief that I might not be aware of the score in last night's North London Derby (pah!) and offer to inform me of the score along with their own witty commentary.

Sadly I have to admit that we deserved our fate. Not on a footballing level but from a fans point of view. Once we had recovered from the early shock of a Bentley wonder shot (aka fluke) from the centre circle and taken the lead and control of the game, the Arsenal fans started chanting "1-0 and you mucked it up" (actually they didn't use the word "mucked" but one that rhymed with it) along with other witticisms about the possibility/probability of Spurs being relegated. A little premature unfortunately - if only the Spurs fans had stayed to the end rather than leaving in their droves in the last 10 minutes they would have been able to return the chant "4-2 and you mucked it up"

So a lesson learnt as Arsene would say. it's not over until the fat lady sings, nor should we count our chickens before they are hatched.

A bit of perspective (for my friends in the other part of North London) - Tottenham have not won the triple or the world club trophy or even the game, Arsenal playing stupidly are 3rd in the league (though not for long if they carry on tossing points away like last night) while Tottenham have 19 clubs above them.

Does this have anything to do with geography? Not really but I could at a stretch introduce the concept of place and local derbies or I could use our presumption of victory as a metaphor for the assumed dominance of 1 player or another in the geospatial marketplace.

Putting your data in the cloud

In his keynote to the ESRI EMEA UC Jack Dangermond slipped in an announcement about ArcGIS Online Sevices (I gathered that this was not a completely new announcement but it seemed to be news to the European delegates). ESRI will host your data (cadastre, imagery or other corporate data) for free on the basis that you allow your data to be used for free by others within the community. Now it is not a completely open ended offer - firstly ESRI have to determine that the content is appropriate to be hosted within AGOL and it would also appear that the services can only be consumed in ArcGIS but even so it is an interesting proposition.

The other evening BBC News had a feaure on cloud computing and the massive data centres that Amazon, Google and Microsoft have built to support their cloud computing initiatives. The feature finished with the slightly scary proposition that at some time in the not too distant future all of our content may reside in the cloud rather than on the hard drive of our PCs. A recent study on cloud computing by Pew Internet Project found:

• 90% of cloud application users say they would be very concerned if the company at which their data were stored sold it to another party.
• 80% say they would be very concerned if companies used their photos or other data in marketing campaigns.
• 68% of users of at least one of the six cloud applications say they would be very concerned if companies who provided these services analyzed their information and then displayed ads to them based on their actions.

Hardly surprising but it does prompt the question - who would you trust with your organisations GI data? You might want to ask what are they going to do with my data and why are they offering to host it for free?

Location Strategy to be published in November (maybe)

We have been waiting for a long time for the UK Location Strategy to be published. The latest news is that it will "almost certainly" be published during November, discussion on cross government funding for the initial 42 month program is ongoing although about 65% has apparently been committed.

ESRI continues to lead with vision

One of the perks of not being associated with a mainstream vendor is that I have the opportunity to attend events like the ESRI EMEA Conference.

For much of my time in this industry I have been impressed by the relationship that ESRI has built with its users, many of whom were always almost religious in their devotion to the company. Very frustrating for a competitor. I like to think that in the time that we were building GDC we learned from that passion and built similarly strong relationships with our clients. So this morning was my opportunity to gain a slightly better understanding about how they have been so successful. In particular I had been looking forward to hearing Jack Dangermond's keynote address.

He started by highlighting all of the different areas that the 1500 delegates worked in - from planning and land information, through public safety, security and defense to earth sciences, natural resource management and climate and conservation. Plus there were quite a lot of people from the business geographics side of the business. What showed through was the clear passion for the value of what people did with ESRI solutions particularly in the public sector, environment and NGOs.

He went on to talk about 4 changes that he saw in the way people worked with GIS (yes ESRI still talk about GIS):

• How we abstract - Digital Geographic Knowledge
• How we reason - Spatially Integrated Reasonoing
• How we organise and communicate - Shared Geographic Thinking
• How we work - Science Based Approach

The vision was summed up as "GIS will become a pervasive part of all human action"

After walking the audience through the technology platform, he closed by talking about the luxury of being a privately owned company that does not have to answer to shatreholders and in particular of being a company with a Social Purpose.

Even if you are a bit of a cynic you could not help but be engaged and inspired by listening to Jack Dangermond talking about the power of geography. I can understand why so many customers, partners and employees want to be part of that vision. I wonder how ESRI will maintain that energy when its founder finally decides to call it a day?

Retail 2.0 - does location matter?

Andy Thompson and I were scheduled to give a presentation today to the Society for Location Analysis at their Mapping Futures. Unfortunately our slot was cancelled at the last minute (sponsors/agenda time table/stuff) so we never gave the presentation but we learnt a lot preparing and discussing the topic.

Online shopping is growing much faster than the overall UK retail market so presumably is capturing market share from traditional bricks and mortar retailers. Does this mean we are facing the inevitable decline of traditional retail outlets? Not quite that simple. Many people will reach a decision by searching online, comparing prices and features and considering customer reviews, then make their purchase in a store to physically evaluate, avoid waiting, the need to be at home to receive the delivery or delivery charges. There is also emerging evidence that retailers with a high street presence gain a larger share of internet traffic than purely on line retailers.

We predicted 3 possible outcomes:

–

• Retail catchment areas will be much smaller in size
• Customers will reject brand loyalty in preference to price/convenience trade-off
• Purchase behaviour will become more complex and transaction patterns less predictable
  

Almost certainly we will need new data sources and new methodologies to understand how locations willl be impacted by these changes in behaviour.

Here are the slides

retail 2.0 - a New Paradigm for Location Analysts

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: retail2.0 retail)

Technolibertarianism

Yesterday I sat in on a talk  by Muki Haklay of UCL entitled "What's so new in Neogeography?"

Muki talked about levels of hacking within the world of neogeo from deep technical hacking (changing GIS application code) through, shallow technical hacking (his words not mine) which I think are mashups to use hacking and meaning hacking which involve using the tools and information in different ways to those originally intended. 

The bit that caught my interest was the somewhat radical view that openness, democratisation, collaboration and other core tenets of the Web 2.0 world may not be quite as benign as we have all been lulled into believing. Is an elegant mashup, such as the US Holocaust Museum with Google Earth, accessed by the technorati creating the illusion of participation instead of prompting people to take action or contribute? Do those clamouring for freer access to publicly created data sets want to provide the same free access to the products they build from this free data? Does the profile of those connecting online to public services exclude those most in need of these services? Does it matter if the profile of completeness of OSM is inverse to the index of multiple deprivation (i.e the most deprived areas are those least covered by OSM)? 

These topics lead Muki to bring in the concept "technolibertarianism" first suggested by Paulina Borsook in her book Cyberselfish in which she describes 

a technology culture which is strongly individualistic, ‘violently lacking in compassion, ravingly anti-government, and tremendously opposed to regulation ...private sector can do everything ...’ protecting privacy, skimping on philanthropy, ignoring environmental concern and hating cities and philanthropy is done directly, deciding on hobby topics, ‘unholistically’ and without trust in governments

Muki suggested that there was a thread of technolibertarianism within the neogeo world

Lack of awareness of serious social problems, little empathy with gender, ability, and ethnicity issues

Strong and thought provoking stuff and I am sure many will disagree but worth discussing at least.

The slides are here and if you want to sit in on the next session entitled "Data Quality and Neogeography" details are here

WUN Global GIS Seminar - What\'s so new in Neogeography?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: critical_gis neogeography)

The crowd delivers snail mail

My son was travelling through his gap year and visited Galapagos in April . 

A couple of weeks ago a somewhat battered postcard arrived through the letter box, hand delivered by two other travellers. 

My son had written "Mum & Dad, if you get this I will tell you the story. If not, then never mind. Love Leo" attached to the card was a note from the post ladies "Found this in Post Office Bay Galapagos and brought it home with us to deliver. It has travelled pretty far!! Love Beccie and Lucy"

Apparently, seafarers and more recently travellers have been leaving mail in Post Office Bay for over 200 years for others to sift through and carry on to the final destination.

The bay is so-named because in 1793, Captain James Colnett installed an empty barrel of rum which works as an informal post box for the sailors who periodically passed through the Galapagos, taking with them letters for their next ports of call or final destinations. Visitors to the islands continue the tradition by placing postcards without stamps inside the barrel which reach their destinations free of charge. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes months, and sometimes the cards never get there at all.

The whole loose concept appeals to me and when it works every one feels good about the process. Of course if your mail is really important this may not be the way to go.

If someone knows Beccie and Lucy, 2 travellers probably from North London who have been to Galapagos in the last few months, please say thanks to them from me and leo - now if that happens it really will close the loop.

Tottenham win an away game!

Directions or a prediction?

Talking geo-gibberish

Alan Wilks is not a GI person but he is ops Director of the AGI and he was a memeber of the conference team and a participant at the GeoCommunity conference.

In his blog he said

I am beginning to think that the problem is not the concepts themselves, but the language used by geographers to explain the concepts. This language is evolving as a tool for geographer to speak to geographer. But as geographers learn that language and use that language, it creates an increasing barrier between the geographers and the layman. And an idea only takes shape once language is used to communicate that idea.

So ironically, just as the technology is making GIS more accessible to the public, the language is making GIS increasingly less accessible. It is almost as if geographers are uncomfortable with widening access to their ideas beyond a perceived audience.

A very good point Alan