If the Internet is a Tool for Communication, We Need to Stay Sharp and Hone our Skills at Using This Tool

Today (May 1) is RSS Awareness Day. Who knew?

I did, and I knew because a blog post about it popped up this morning in my RSS feed reader. A part of my job as GIS Coordinator for Delaware (and GIS practitioner for State Planning, and Census Data Person, and aware state employee) is to pay attention to what is going on in these various areas of practice. So I regularly scan headlines, and read content, from blogs, news organizations, and professional organizations. And I do so via their RSS feeds.

And we can and should use RSS feeds to share our information with our various audiences. In Delaware we use RSS to share headlines and items of interest with our constituents. Here on the NSGIC Blog you'll see both State GIS News, aggregated from our members' RSS feeds, and Links by NSGIC Folks, which uses RSS to collect things some of us have found and tagged as "of GIS interest."

Are you using RSS as completely as you could? If you are publishing RSS as a State GIS Coordinator, please let us know via the comments section below and we will add you to the State GIS News feed. Are there other ways we should be using this tool?

Please, share...

More Mapped Election Finances

The Federal Elections Commission has announced a map-presentation of campaign finance data for House and Senate races in 2008. This is a companion to the Presidential campaign finance map we noted in June.

A mouse-over on the House and Senate version shows the number of Representative Districts in the state. Clicking on the map brings up a state-view showing all the Districts boundaries. Mousing-over on that map highlights the District and shows the folks running for that seat.


From there, one can drill down to see detailed financial and donor data for each candidate.

As map-presented data goes, this is a fairly simple-looking site. But it leads users to a wealth of data. And that's probably the point.

A Geospatial Presentation of Campaign Finance Information

The Federal Elections Commission has established a map-based interface with its campaign contributions data.

The 2008 Presidential Campaign Finance Map "summarizes financial information disclosed by each active 2008 Presidential candidate who has reported at least $10,000 in contributions from individuals other than the candidate," according to the FEC web site.

The site uses a simple "CONUS" view of the nation, with Alaska and Hawaii tucked-in where Mexico would be. Amounts of contributions are represented by circles of different relative sizes. Clicking on a state's circle will "zoom" to a state-level view with circles showing contribution amounts by 3-digit ZIP code levels. Clicking on those circles, if you have a candidate selected, brings you to the individual contribution records.

Users can view data for all candidates, candidates by party affiliation, or for individual candidates. the map-based presentation offers a simple, intuitive way to view one aspect of campaign contributions -- where geographically they come from.

The site currently shows about $157 million in contributions through the end of March. The next update will come in July.

GIS Coordination as Social Networking?

David Sacks, founder of the genealogy website Geni and a former leader at PayPal, has written a guest-post at TechCrunch in which he argues that the future of the web portal will shift from the current "search" model (Google) to the "social-web" model (FaceBook).

I think that this shift holds lessons and perhaps opportunities for GIS Coordination and creating the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).

In his post (The New Portals: It’s the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter), Sacks notes that the earliest web portal model was "browsing," as embodied by Yahoo. He traces Yahoo's decline in market-share against Google to the changing number of web sites. Early on, a limited pool of sites could be accessed through Yahoo's browse-able catalog.

But as the number of websites became infinite, search replaced browsing as the dominant paradigm for finding new sites, and Yahoo’s failure to keep up in this area allowed Google to take the lead.

Sacks suggests that the paradigm is shifting again. Now, networks of like-minded web citizens are starting to guide each other to content through a variety of tagging and aggregation systems.

The “social graph,” or your network of relationships, will push information to you. You’ll learn from your friends.

It is his thesis that FaceBook is developing the portal platform that best embodies this new model.

That may or may not be the case, but this idea does make me think of some of the ways we try to create and maintain strong state-level GIS Communities to enable the NSDI.

Increasingly, we are bending the tools of the social web to our needs, publishing RSS feeds, starting blogs related to GIS, and using tagging sites such as del.icio.us to note and aggregate useful content.

I think we can do more. The key to the social web is wide participation. The strength of NSGIC is the breadth and depth of its membership. Our challenge now is to increase the links among that membership on this new and growing social web.

NSGIC's Jon Gottsegen Makes FCW.COM

A story on FCW (Colorado combines GIS, weather data) reports on a project in Colorado to combine local GIS data with a feed of weather information from WeatherBug.

Jon Gottsegen, Colorado’s state GIS coordinator, said WeatherBug's Web service feeds into the state’s Emergency Operations Center.

According to WeatherBug's Christian Solomine, Jon's work makes Colorado the first state the company's services.

Therefore, when we all gather in Annapolis for the NSGIC Mid-Year Conference, I propose that Jon serve as official NSGIC meteorologist.