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2007 on the NSGIC Blog

The NSGIC Blog received 5,401 visits during 2007, with 8,107 different "page views" according to data collected via Google Analytics. There were 75 different posts covering topics ranging from NSGIC meetings and business to the latest on-line map mash-ups.

The large majority of visitors came from within the United States, though there were a handful of visitors from Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Australia, Spain and a few other nations. There were visits from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, but the largest number of visits was from Pennsylvania, followed by Ohio, Delaware, Wisconsin, and California.

More than half of the page views were of the NSGIC Blog main page, suggesting that most visitors read the top few blog posts that were available at the time of their visit. Among individual blog posts that were viewed directly, some the most visited were:

• Former NSGIC Keynote Speaker Matt Miszewski to Step Down, a post about the resignation of the Wisconsin CIO who had been a keynote speaker at the 2006 NSGIC Annual Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas.
• How Remote is Your Sensed Data?, a post about geospatial analysis using "found" geodata.
• "Part of our Ecosystem", a post about recent discussions of the growth of Google and other data visualization tools.
• Transportation for the Nation, an overview of the NSGIC effort to craft a national transportation data approach.
  

The NSGIC Blog has been active since early in 2006. NSGIC leadership placed a focus on the blog starting in 2007 and various members of the NSGIC Communications Committee have started trying to add posts on a more regular basis.

There are several different ways to take advantage of the NSGIC Blog. Readers can subscribe via an RSS feed of posts and/or via an e-mail subscription service that provides a daily digest of any new posts.

What's Going on at the URISA Conference?

Adena Schutzberg, of All Points Blog, is providing running commentary and updates from the 2007 URISA Annual Conference of , in Washington DC.

Today, for example, she offers an idea of the themes she sees developing at this event:

1. "...a need to grab onto and hold tight the idea of a geospatial discipline."
2. "...URISA is redefining itself around policy and more management/leadership education."
3. "The topics of the conference are not cutting edge..."

Adena is a keen observer and intelligent reporter. We can't all attend all the conferences and meetings there are in the geospatial world. But when someone is doing a good job blogging them, and Adena does, it pays to read along from afar.

On Adding Comments and New Postings

Some of the members of this blog are very new to blogging and have asked for a short primer on adding comments and posts.

You can either create a new posting on the blog, or add a comment to an existing posting.

Commenting
To add a comment, just scroll to the bottom of the post. There you will see "# COMMENTS". The variable "#", of course, will refer to the number of comments already left. If there are none, this is "0 COMMENTS," if there is one comment it will be "1 COMMENT."

If you are viewing the post as part of the main NSGIC Blog page, or a monthly archive page, this text is a link to the commenting form. If you are viewing the post as a stand-alone page (as is probably the case just now), you will also see the text "POST A COMMENT" which is a link to the commenting page.

Follow one of these links to the comment-editing page. You may need to add your sign-in information, if we are set for comments only from members of this blog (your Blogger sign-in). Eventually, I think we will make this open to comments from all, though we will encourage people to sign in. There will also be a "WORD Verification" set, to avoid spam.

Posting New Content
If you are a member of the NSGIC Blog Team of Contributors, you can add new posts! To add a new post, go to http://www2.blogger.com/home and sign in. You should then see the blog listed as "The NSGIC Blog" with some sort of button that lets you add a "New Post." Ignore the blog simply called "NSGIC" if you see it, that's the old address. We're keeping that around for a short time as a "redirect" page.

On the posting page, you'll have a spot for a Post Title, and a link. I don't usually use the link field, but rather put the link in the text of the post.

Your post's text goes into the large text box. This has a variety of WYSIWYG tools that are all fairly self-evident. You can either "Edit HTML" in which case you will see all the html tags, or "Compose" in which case you won't.

You can "Preview", "Save as Draft", or "Publish." Don't worry about messing anything up. I can go in and edit stuff if need be.

I think it is important that we all try to add useful posts and comments to the Blog. It's like a listserv -- only as useful as what it is used for.