Slashgeo

Slashgeo has been providing aggregated geonews, and more, for thousands of daily readers during the last two years. In order to revive the site, here's the final call to collaborators. Thanks to the OSGeo mailing list, several people have already expressed their intentions to contribute regularly to feeding Slashgeo! :-) I'm not claiming victory yet, but if we gather a new team of 5 to 10 people, it will make involvement fun and not too time consuming for any single individual. Even if you have just 1 hour/week to spare for one or two aggregated stories, that's great. Read on below for more details, planning and suggestions. And while I have your attention, a few interesting geonews came out during the last two weeks (which I may catch up for our readers), including a great article on how Google Earth really works, Windows Vista support for ArcGIS 9.2, the release of GDAL/OGR 1.4.2 and this interesting introduction to a comparison of webmapping APIs.

GCN describes via an interesting article how "the competition to provide geospatial data via the Web has become a full-scale arms race". This enforces the idea that the future of Web 2.0 is location awareness.

Let me share some comments on Slashgeo's comeback after a shorter than anticipated hiatus. I gain no personal benefice in managing Slashgeo, probably the opposite happens in fact! Many readers expressed their wish for seeing Slashgeo alive again and this is great :-) One condition to it was the building of a new team of editors to select and publish stories. How has it been going? It's a great start in my opinion, several new editors joined the team and have already published almost 30 stories together. Sincere thanks to these geospecial individuals! I'll be mostly away from the computer by the end of the year: since I suspect it may require months to assemble a new solid and autonomous team, it's not impossible Slashgeo's revival will fail. I'll try my best to avoid this. Criticism, such as Datum Shift's recent comments about Slashgeo over a story published by a new editor, which triggered this status report, is relevant. We are listening to constructive criticism and we are trying our best to improve the site with the little resources we have. Anyone wanting to help improve the service and its quality is welcomed to join! At the moment, I tend to believe we have thousands of daily readers for mainly one reason: manually selected and aggregated geonews. This is what we'll continue to provide to the best of our abilities while hoping Slashgeo will eventually become something of greater usefulness to the geospatial community.