new jersey geographer

Alcyon Lake

Brought my Blackberry with me on a bike ride around Glassboro and Pitman. I used beGPS One, a Blackberry GPS logging application to record my location every 30 seconds as an NMEA sentence. I then used GPSBabel to covert the file to KML format. You can view the KML of my route here. I also took the geotagged picture of Alcyon Lake at right. Finally, tweets during the trip are also geotagged.

Most of the information we deal with daily (or in this case, generate) has some geospatial component. Why not explicitly recognize the route I took or the places I photographed? Sure, some will feel that geotagging could be abused, but both Twitter and Flickr require you to explicitly allow geotagged information to be shown to other users. Facebook strips out geotagged information from uploaded photos. If there’s no real privacy concerns, you should share your pictures and tweets tagged with geographic coordinates.

The property of a randomly chosen "John Smith"

Mecklenburg County (Charlotte), North Carolina is currently facing an information-sharing predicament. POLARIS, their county-wide interactive web map, currently serves up property ownership information as part of the real property and tax records in the county databases. The county is looking to remove the ability to search by owner to locate land records, mainly because the police are concerned that criminals may use the system to target officers’ homes. I appreciate the concern for the safety of the police force, however theoretically anyone could target anyone else using public records. Just because you have a hammer doesn’t mean you’re going to start hitting people with it. Intentionally crippling a web service and reducing accessibility should always be seen as a major step backwards. (more…)

There’s been a flurry of posts across the web about Please Rob Me, a site that aggregates check-ins on sites like FourSquare, illustrating the fact that we’ve known all along: people are willing to release more information than they realize. Outrage follows once the fact that technology allows information to be easily aggregated and distributed is demonstrated like this. (more…)

Yesterday, I gave an introduction to open source GIS at MAC URISA. As the meeting was about Internet-enabled GIS, I focused on server-side software. I’ve made the presentation available on SlideShare and available as a download from my website.

Here’s a listing of the programs and standards I reference in the presentation:

• Open Source Initiative
• Open Source Geospatial Foundation
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• MapServer
• GeoServer
  • “OpenGeo Architecture” Whitepaper
• TileCache
• OpenLayers
• Web Map Service
• Web Feature Service
• KML

Here’s the sites I referenced as examples using open source GIS:

• NYCityMap
• The White House’s Delivering on Change
• New Jersey State Atlas
• NJGIN’s Information Warehouse
• NuMaps’ DemographicDrapes
• OpenStreetMap
• GeoNames
• GeoCommons’ Finder! and Maker!

Kate was tracking my progress home tonight, as I was going to pick up Thai food along the way. I manually set my location to “Thailand” and found when I got home, Kate was very confused as to where I was. Setting my location to “Thailand” actually set me as being in “Nong Chaeng,” which I assume is the closest place name to Google’s center point for Thailand.

When will Google release an API for Latitude? It should also tie into OpenSocial, like how iGoogle and Orkut do now. Google has been really great in releasing new and innovative social networking components and applications, but they need to really follow through and support their creations. Offer up an API and the community will do the rest.

Kate and I are down in Southwest Florida visiting her family. We drove down from New Jersey and used Google Latitude to share our location with her family and my parents. Kate and I also are taking some pictures using my GPS-enabled BlackBerry and are posting them on Flickr.

There probably won’t be many updates to NJ Geo and NJ State Atlas until I come back up next week.

AppleInsider has a tip that the upcoming version of Mac OS X, dubbed “Snow Leopard” will incorporate the GPS and location-based services library from the iPhone into the laptop/desktop version of the operating service.

They postulate that “CoreLocation will utilize a Mac’s existing networking hardware to triangulate the system’s location in a manner similar to the way the original iPhone was able to use the technology to emulate a true global positioning signal.” Is the inclusion of GPS into future Apple laptops too foreign a concept? I’m holding out for the GPS-enabled Macbook Mini, a netbook running OS X smaller than the current offerings. With more and more location-based applications (BrightKite, Google Latitude) for mobile phones being released each day, why wouldn’t Apple start looking into including GPS into its computers?

via SlashGeo

The New York Times has a great interactive map showing Twitter activity during the Super Bowl. I absolutely love what the New York Times has been doing.

Digital Urban has a writeup of one of the newest, perhaps most exciting feature to be added to Google Earth. Historic aerial photography! For many places around the globe, you now have access to previous aerial photography, as far back as 1950 in some places. I’ll have to take a look into what Google has for New Jersey; are the 1930s aerial photographs available in Google Earth?

Gizmodo has an interesting exchange between one of their bloggers and the developer of an iPhone App that’s designed to help you steal other iPhone apps. He’s upset that Gizmodo linked to a cracked version, not his official version. Oh, the ironing is delicious.