My favorite video podcast, Cool Hunting, got a little confused lately and pushed this amazing breakdance clip down to my iTunes instead of the announced Mika Rottenberg video. I’m glad they did.
Who would have thought that Tchaikovsky and b-boys/girls go so well together!
I can probably list more than a hundred studies, reports or articles dealing with the negative impact of cars on modern city structures. But none of them illustrates the benefit of car-free cities so well as the image below does:
City of Münster showing the amount of space occupied if the same group of people would go by car, bus or bike.
Which street would you prefer for living: the one packed with cars or the one where kids could play on?
I never owned a car and don’t plan to do so. My mobility is based on bike, public transport and car sharing and I can’t complain about a low standard of living. [via Helge]
While others are offering an API or are working on even free access to public geodata, we are releasing a new portal with 5 different shop versions for public tax funded geodata.
Let alone that the world record attempt for using the smallest possible font size in an unlucky Cheetah UI rip-off isn’t quite state of the art in the year 2008. Especially not in times were public agencies are asked (by law!) to fulfill basic WAI requirements.
…see you tomorrow at Tupalo’s!
Our partners had a wonderful idea for the start page of an online atlas we are working on together. Obviously it’s inspired by iTunes’ Cover Flow, but as we think works well on map indexes too.
It basically works similar to album art, where visual impressions are associated with audio. On the map flow, the visual impression, the color scheme and map type identified on the map thumbnail, can be associated with a certain topic, theme or map in particular – greenish is likely environmental, blue/red tones demographic, etc.
By using AJAX, the map flow is very efficient in terms of occupied space on the page. Instead of long lists and tables, the map flow only needs the size of one paragraph on the page, where users can browse the entire atlas by flipping map thumbnails around (which is fun too btw).
I can’t demo it here, you’ll have to head over to our application to see it in action. A rudimentary English version is available.
There is still much work ahead of us. For the next upcoming release we reduced the amount of newly planned features and try to focus on usability improvements instead. After all, we want an easy to use thematic mapping tool.
It’s still too early to talk in numbers, but I expect the map flow to reduce the bounce rate and make our maps more accessible.
Information about activities related to the ICA working group “Art & Cartography” is now on their blog available:
This working group, which is part of the International Cartographic Association (ICA), has been created in August 2008 to explore the increasing relations between art and cartography, and to stimulate new forms of interaction.
Personally I find that field very fascinating and looking forward to see more events/publications coming from that direction.
Sure, KML is a great (additional) format for map dissemination nowadays, but saying
Our choice to give KML to the OGC is part of our strong commitment to open standards.
pushes the “don’t be evil” credo a little. Look closer and you’ll see something like
We need the geo-industry to focus and produce more searchable geo content.
between the lines.
I’m still surprised that the HTML of geographic content is not listed at W3C, right next to standards like SVG, MathML, SMIL, etc.
Last week an interesting email dropped in my inbox. It links to a decree of the Spanish Ministry of Public Works (Ministerio de Fomento) about the Spanish geodata policy.
One paragraph of the decree is obviously talking about the INSPIRE directive, guaranteeing free public access to basically nothing more than metadata and pretty overview thumbnails of available public geodata.
While most European national mapping agencies stop at that point by just implementing catalog services and pretty map thumbnails, the Spanish government goes further: although I’m afraid my Spanish is not good enough to interpret legal documents 100% correctly, I think the email author is right saying the document talks about free access and (non-commercial, attribution) use of Spanish public geodata.
Artículo 3. Servicios de acceso, análisis y procesamiento en línea y distribución.
3. La descarga por medios telemáticos en línea, utilizando los servicios de información geográfica habilitados por el CNIG, para uso no comercial realizada por el usuario de la información geográfica producida por el IGN, será gratuita.
…
Artículo 7. Uso libre y gratuito.
La licencia de uso libre y gratuito será única y tendrá el siguiente alcance:
a) Exclusivamente para usos no comerciales.
b) Su concesión llevará implícito el compromiso de citar al Instituto Geográfico Nacional como autor y propietario de la información.
This is a MAJOR step for European geodata policy and it’ll be interesting to see if other governments will follow the excellent Spanish example.
The JRC recently published the report “Socio-Economic Impact of SDI” (62 pages pdf), clearly emphasizing the benefits of free public geodata:
8.2 Political and social impact
…
The socio-political impact areas of IDEC, in line with the objectives of the INSPIRE programme, affect a broad array of users, especially those linked to the public sector and to serving the general public (e.g. public administration, public services, and universities), such that the entire community benefits from access to information and spatial data. Nevertheless, this is an ongoing process that demands a change in mentality towards a culture of shared data, in which the contributions of each party enrich the whole and can be shared by all. Freeing this information will ultimately enable everyone to prosper from general social and economic development.
…
So there is hope that one day European taxpayers can freely access and use the products created with their own tax money.
I don’t understand why so many people complain about the recently introduced video feature on Flickr.
90sec won’t turn Flickr into another YouTube – Flickr already haz cat photos btw – but 90sec allow users to create interesting versions of their static images.
I’m looking forward seeing more long photos on Flickr!
Some news do make me wonder if the proverb
There is no such thing as bad publicity
still remains true.