Gary's Bloggage » 2009 http://www.vicchi.org Geo-blogging, geo-talking and geo-tweeting, these are the occasional ramblings of a self professed "geek with a life" Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:39:42 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 2009 In Review Part 3: People http://www.vicchi.org/2009/12/24/2009-in-review-part-3-people/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=2009-in-review-part-3-people http://www.vicchi.org/2009/12/24/2009-in-review-part-3-people/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:00:03 +0000 Gary http://www.vicchi.org/2009/12/24/2009-in-review-part-3-people/ Continue reading →]]> I finished up part 2 of my 2009 review with the observation that 2009 seemed to be a lot less about technology and more about communities and people so what better way to end my 2009 review by calling attention to the people who I feel deserve mention.

Firstly and most importantly there’s my wife, my children and my family. You know who you all are. You put up with me, with geo and with my work and online life and you never stop believing. I don’t need to say anymore

Then there’s the other people who’ve believed, a word I’ve used a lot in this set of linked 2009 review posts, who’ve helped, supported, encouraged, criticised and who’ve given me a platform to speak on.

And finally there’s my team, my group, the Geo Technologies crowd in the United States and in the United Kingdom; you continue to produce one of the finest geo platforms there is and you consistently make me look good.

  • Martin Barnes
  • Walter Andrag
  • Mike Dickson
  • Holger Dürer
  • Bob Craig
  • Roman Kirillov
  • Eddie Babcock
  • Samira Swarnkar
  • Rob Halliday
  • Rob Tyler
  • Chris Gent
  • Steve May
  • Ali Abtoy
  • Andrei Bychay

2009 was a good year for people and for geo; I look forward to writing 2010′s review of the year and see that we’ve gone to the great heights that The Guardian and Garner expect of the location aware Internet.

That’s it; I’m all blogged out for 2009 and so I wish a very Happy Christmas and a geo-tastic New Year to you all.

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]]> http://www.vicchi.org/2009/12/24/2009-in-review-part-3-people/feed/ 0 2009 In Review Part 2: Organisations http://www.vicchi.org/2009/12/24/2009-in-review-part-2-organisations/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=2009-in-review-part-2-organisations http://www.vicchi.org/2009/12/24/2009-in-review-part-2-organisations/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:00:57 +0000 Gary http://www.vicchi.org/2009/12/24/2009-in-review-part-2-organisations/ Continue reading →]]> In an earlier post, I wrote about the gadgets that made 2009; now it’s time to look at the organisations and by strange coincidence, as there were 3 gadgets, so there are 3 organisations.

First up is OpenStreetMap. One of the things I write about a lot is geographic data, how everyone wants free, open, high quality data but how no-one really wants to pay for it. While attempts to monetise the data corpus of OpenStreetMap haven’t entirely succeeded, yet, there’s no denying that all the contributors to one of the biggest crowdsourced data projects on the Internet … believe, and they’ve created something incredible.

The second organisation is the Ordnance Survey, or to be more specific, the staff of the Ordnance Survey. Much maligned and the object of much derision within the geo community, the majority of the staff as the OS have been working towards opening up the vast reams of excellent high quality geo data and it finally looks as if their hard work and belief is paying off.

And thirdly is the folks behind the GeoVation Challenge Award. GeoVation is all about doing stuff, worthwhile and exciting stuff with geography, with location and with geo. It’s funded by the Ordnance Survey but it isn’t an Ordnance Survey project per se. The best way to view it is the Ordnance Survey’s first, hesitant, tentative steps towards opening up their data.

The people behind OpenStreetMap believe in open data, the people behind the Ordnance Survey want to believe in open data and I believe in the GeoVation Challenge, so much so that I’ve accepted an offer of a seat on the judging panel for the Awards.

2009 seemed to be less about technology and more about communities and people, and that means a lot of belief.

Coming up later today is Part 3: People …

Photo credits: mikeyashworth and simonperry on Flickr

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]]> http://www.vicchi.org/2009/12/24/2009-in-review-part-2-organisations/feed/ 2 2009 In Review Part 1: Gadgets http://www.vicchi.org/2009/12/24/2009-in-review-part-1-gadgets/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=2009-in-review-part-1-gadgets http://www.vicchi.org/2009/12/24/2009-in-review-part-1-gadgets/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:57:48 +0000 Gary http://www.vicchi.org/2009/12/24/2009-in-review-part-1-gadgets/ Continue reading →]]> As the end of 2009 and of the decade of the noughties approaches rapidly, I thought it worthwhile to look back over the previous 12 months and give credit where credit is due or overdue. So let’s start with gadgets.

Not one but three. 

Firstly there’s Posterous. Can a web service be a gadget? I think so. According to Wikipedia, gadgets ”are invariably considered to be more unusually or cleverly designed than normal technological objects at the time of their invention”.

So, Posterous. Yes it’s a blog creation tool but it’s a simple, fiendishly simple blog creation tool. Nothing more than an email to post@posterous.com and you’re done. It’s how I wrote and posted this post. You focus more on the act of what you’re writing, or the photo you’ve just taken, than on the mechanism where the post is formatted and uploaded. My posterous blog is http://vicchi.posterous.com/ and this auto feeds into my main WordPress driven blog at http://www.vicchi.org/. Add in the other services that Posterous can update and some WordPress plugins and by the mere act of sending a mail, I post to Posterous, to my self hosted WordPress blog which in turn notifies Twitter and Facebook. Phew.

The second gadget is still my iPhone. Forget the controversy over the appstore approvals process, forget the appalling coverage that O2 provides here in the UK and focus instead on the fact that just as Posterous has pretty much revolutionised the way I blog, the iPhone has revolutionised the way in which I interact with the internet, where ever I am. Well, at least where ever I have coverage and I’m not being fleeced for international roaming charges that is.

The final gadget is YQL. The Yahoo! Query Language. This simple, easy, free, web service allows me to pull in feeds from my blog at http://www.vicchi.org/, my work blog at http://www.ygeoblog.com/, my decks on Slideshare, my photos on Flickr, my bookmarks on delicious and a whole slew of other sources and produce the dynamically updated vanity site of http://www.garygale.com/. All this through a single SQL-a-like select statement, some PHP and the Yahoo! User Interface library. Phew (again).

Coming up later today is Part 2: Organisations …

Photo credits: PurpleLime, Sam Doidge and Studio Ego on Flickr

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