Author: Ed Parsons

Categories
Technology Thoughts

BBC reports the end of the Scobleizer blog

The importance of corporate bloggers as a source of useful information (mostly without spin) was demonstrated by yesterdays reporting of the resignation of Robert Scoble from Microsoft by the BBC.

Scobles’ blog, for many a must read to understand what was actually happening in Redmond, had become a true icon of the blogosphere.

I’m not sure either Scoble or Microsoft fully understand the impact of his resignation, or the shift in users focus from relining on corporate PR to blogs for information.

Written and submitted from the Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, using the hotels broadband network.

Categories
Aviation

Hot for a flying jacket..


Click picture for more..


Tick off another ambition thanks to a wonderful birthday present from my wife, and the excellent chaps at Delta Aviation at Sywell.

On one of the hottest days so far this year in the UK, I donned an Irving Jacket to go for a trial lesson in a 1941 vintage DH82A Tiger Moth, and spent a happy but warm 30 minutes flying round Northamptonshire at 1,500 feet.

A highly recommended way to see the countryside, and I’m afraid I might just catch the bug, however rather than saving for lessons and my PPL I might just spend the money on a joyride in the P51 Mustang, Delta also operate !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
GIS OGC

Where 2.0 – The challenge of innovation from the edge

Where2.0

Next week I will be attending the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, and if it has anything like the impact the conference had last year on the Geographic Information world, it will not disappoint.

Although last year saw major announcements from the GYM club, it was the presentations from people like Nathan Eagle and the father of mash-ups Paul Rademacher who really demonstrated the paradigm shift that is happening in the use of geographic information.

Neither Nathan or Paul come from the “traditional” GIS industry and although it is not unusual for innovation to come from the edge of an existing domain, it is causing a real cultural clash with the established industry.

The “mash-up” community have a different culture and a different world view to the traditional industry, this was perfectly illustrated this week in the blogosphere with a discussion around how the developing GeoRSS standard is taken forward, with well argued points made by Allan Doyle in his blog, where he expresses concerns as to the potential for OGC to “hijack” the standard.

The OGC, I hope in this case, wish only to move towards greater adoption of GeoRSS, but may have to modify their processes radically in recognition that the dynamic of the industry has changed – a point many other organisations representing the “traditional” GI industry would do well to recognise.

If you are travelling to where 2.0 drop me a line – It would be good to catch up over a beer and meet in real life.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
GIS Oracle

5,000 changes a day and other urban myths..

We all know the statistic that 80% of all information is spatial, but I guess like most people I’m not clear where that particular figure has come from, and thinking about it.. I not convinced it is actually true. There is much information held in databases around the world which is about activities which happen at specific locations, but as much as 80% ?

Another much repeated statistic is that Ordnance Survey makes 5000 changes to the national geospatial database every day – this time however, although I’m not sure where the statistic came from, I can put more accurate figures in place.

As part of the development of a new Oracle Spatial database system, we have looked at the number of transactions going through the database in order to scale the system, a 10 node RAC cluster by the way ..

In general day to day operations the OS actually makes between 30-50,000 changes per day, representing the modification of existing features in the database and the addition of new features into the landscape, things like new housing estates.

Over the past few years however a larger than average amount of change has been happening as a result of the Positional Accuracy Improvement Programme, resulting in peaks of 500,000 changes in a day !!

These figures sound a lot especially compared to the often stated 5,000 changes a day, but you need to remember the database contains around a billion individual features.

We really did need a new database !!!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Google Maps Thoughts

Spoof ? Google maps Ad

Google Map ad

Thanks to my old pal Berik, for the link to this video , a spoof ad for Google Maps ? So good it could be real or then again is this another example of a great viral campaign..

Categories
GIS Thoughts

Spatial analysis hits the mainstream..

mySociety Travel maps

mySociety have put the analysis of geographical information into the mainstream press, with the London evening newspaper, The Standard running a report today on the Travel Maps they have created working with the Dept. for Transport in the UK.

This is great to see, and again compliments to Tom and Chris for the work they are doing, but don’t you think it is strange that the usefulness of this type of spatial analysis has been popularised in the eyes of the media by the guys at mySociety and not the traditional users of GI who have had access to this data and the tools to produce isochrones for many years.

BTW I live right between the two red vectors to the west of London indicating faster travel times.. ah well 🙂

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
GIS Thoughts

E911 almost there…

Wired reports on progress in the US on E911 legislation which requires mobile operators to pass the location of emergency calls to the emergency services. Despite a 2005 deadline most providers it appears are only now getting to the position where location data is available and unlike in Europe the route adopted has been through the use of GPS enabled phones, rather than network based analysis.

For the benefit of public safety the faster this and the equivalent E112 rules in Europe are met the better, but remember this will also provide a major boost to the reawakening LBS market.

As I have noted before however knowing where you are is only part of the answer for the development of the LBS market, we still need richer geospatial databases and most importantly really compelling applications.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Telewest Thoughts

Beware the early adopter – don’t use a TVDrive yet…

tvdrive

After many years of happy service I replaced my trusty Tivo with a new Hard Disk PVR that my cable company Telewest have just introduced. The TVDrive has multiple tunners, HD TV support and a larger hark disk capacity – sounds great.

But I was one of the first to take the service, and yes you guessed it this is a major bug in the system software which means that it won’t record a series – a basic function of a PVR.

The frustration with consumer electronics for the geek is that you can’t get in and hack them to fix problems (something you could do with the tivo incidentally !!) – so my advice to any other potential telewest customers out there is to wait for us early adopters to find all the other bugs first !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
virtual earth

Virtual Earth UK, now with new imagery!

virtual earth uk

Microsoft have launched a new UK versions of virtual earth with new imagery sourced from getmapping. The imagery seems to leapfrog the imagery in google earth/maps seeming to be more recent at least in the area I looked at and appears to be around the same resolution 15-20cm.

Remember Microsoft have adopted a more conventional business model with virtual earth, and are selling it as a service to commercial users, in contrast to googles surposed “non-commercial” only approach

Written and submitted from the Holiday Inn Express Exeter, using the hotels wifi network.

Categories
Technology Thoughts

Berners-Lee backs net neutrality

Silicon.com reports on a presentation given by Tim Berners-Lee in Edinburgh yesterday putting his support behind the movement to maintain the concept of “Net Neutrality”.

Net Neutrality describes the current status quo where all network traffic is equal in the eyes of the providers of network infrastructure, e.g your network packet containing email to granny is the same as a packet containing some video from youtube.com.

The network providers, in the US in particular, want to change this and charge a premium for particular content, as a way of potentially reducing plague of p2p traffic you might look at this, but the reality is these guys just want to get paid twice.

I hate to say this but this may be a difficult battle to fight, the idea of value based pricing of infrastructure is well established in other areas, your car tax is much less than that of a 30 tonne truck…
however we really must try all we can to protect the pricing model of today, unlike the physical world there is no actual difference between network traffic containing different content, unfortunately lawmakers seem to have great difficulty understanding the world of bits rather than atoms !