Brain Off » Open Source Geo Stack :: Mikel Maron :: Building Digital Technology for Our Planet - since I emailed Mikel asking for a list like this about a year and a half ago, I can take credit for it, right?
Anyhow this is a great list that includes everything except the actual sources of data. The best one for that is often OpenStreetMap, but it really depends where and what you’re mapping.
Okay, so I am cheating a bit here. Rather than writing a new post, I’m linking to a page on my wiki where I have been collecting links for several years already: mfagan wiki / waterloo geo stuff.
Back when I started UWhub (now largely defunct) it was first going to be a mapping site for the area around campus. Then I decided it would be easier to make just regular web search first, then add a search with a geographic component (e.g. housing search), at which point I would add the map. Apparently a search engine can be a lot of work 
so I never got past that. But since the beginning there I have been collecting links for tools and resources for mapping the University of Waterloo, the city itself, etc. At some point it moved from a text file to a spot on my wiki, and I cleaned up and edited a lot of it recently. I have also dumped some other things on the page that don’t have much to do with mapping.
So that was a long prelude to me pointing out that that page is an extremely useful and comprehensive resource. While it is very unlikely I will actually put all the data into a single map site, the collection of links by itself is great. It includes lots of maps, at various scales (one classroom within the school, the entire world…), and tons of other data sources that can be mapped in some way, such as businesses, transit, housing, news, jobs, etc. It includes a lot of resources most people didn’t know existed, from health inspection records for all food outlets in the region, maps of crimes in the area by week and crime type, interactive maps with high resolution aerial imagery from multiple different years, geological data, historical and future maps, detailed maps of the all the floors of all the UW libraries, etc. And I keep finding new things to add, let me know if you see things I’m missing. I will definitely reference some of these links on a later post about the city.
dougmccune.com » Blog Archive » Not Your Mamma’s Maps - a very slick app for browsing geospatial data. Their screencast shows input through a geoRSS feed, but I am guessing that will not be freely available. Via Mikel.
You Are What You Grow - this is a very true and depressing story of the massive implications of the US’s farm bill, which everyone should read. Via del.icio.us.
Map sources/GeoHack
- very cool, provides links to mapping sites at specified coordinates; this is a much more comprehensive version of my similar service.
work seems to be keeping me rather busy
Yesterday I got around to fixing a several-month-old bug with my University of Waterloo search engine. Turns out the problem was Yahoo having changed their query parser. The query I was sending used to be
search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com)
however example.com wasn’t showing up on the results… the fix was adding a space before the ending parentheses.
search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com )
I wish Yahoo would publicly document all of their advanced search syntax, including the maximum query length.
I’ve been meaning to do another OpenSearch Update post. I’ve recently started adding some of these to del.icio.us. Noticing lots of non-English blog posts on OpenSearch lately, which is very cool. Today someone asked about including thumbnails. I’ve replied suggesting Media RSS but asking for consensus (although my email still needs to be moderated).
Lots of neat stuff in the mapping space lately. Thanks to Mikel Maron, Virtual Earth now has georss feeds.
So for years I’ve been largely ignoring the social networking websites. Or to be more accurate, reading up on them a lot, but not actually using them. Among other things, I don’t want to waste my time, nor provide a lot of my personal data to some walled garden. Regarding the latter, PeopleAggregator has been out for a while, and I hadn’t gotten around to congradulating Marc and Phillip. Anyhow, Facebook came to my school (this year I believe) and I’ve found that I’m actually using it. Not much, but more than I’ve ever used another similar site. Unlike the first generation of these websites, it actually has a point to it. I’m still resisting uploading photos to it (if I annotate those photos, am I ever going to be able to export that? highly unlikely) and I don’t like using it for messaging, because it won’t be searchable and integrated with my email or instant messaging services. Amusingly enough, I do think Facebook will actually succeed in making money. Hmn.. I guess I don’t have any major point to make here..
