Month: November 2006

Web 2.0 for the suits

Tim O’Rilley has successfully developed the Web2.0 label, and is now exploiting the interest of “Big” Business by writing a report Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices: ” with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com

The report based on the now classic web2.0 paper is aimed at a market beyond the normal “alpha geek”, instead O’Reily are for the first time really targeting business strategists, investors, and well.. suits !

For the comments to the original posting of this announcement the reaction has been rather negative to say the least, attacking the high cost of the report. The critism I think misses the point here, this is the type of audience that Gartner or Meta Group sell reports costs thousands of dollars to, and who an wiling to pay from quality foresight.

O’Reilly is a business after all !!

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

TBL on Blogging

Tim Berners-Lee makes another of his rare and insightful postings on his blog commenting on the media’s view of his new Web Science Research Initiative.

I’m not alone I’m sure, in thinking that the WSRI, a joint initiative between MIT and the great people at Southampton University, which looks to view the growth of the web from a societal as much as a scientific point of view is especially important when looking to the development of the GeoWEB.

Earth rise There is I’m certain for example a important piece of research to study the impact of exploration tools such as Google Earth and ArcGIS Explorer on users understandings of the physical, social and political environments. Could such tools have a similar but smaller effect to the famous Apollo 8 Earthrise image on todays geographically illiterate generation.

It’s also nice to know that I am not alone at occasionally getting misinterpreted in the Guardian – Sorry Charles 🙂

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

GIS OS Research Thoughts

Research Labs project reported in New Scientist

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date November 1, 2006
3 Comments on Research Labs project reported in New Scientist

As a A-Level Physics student, I used to love reading New Scientist in the School Library – I could at least understand it.. maybe reading too much of it, resulted in my spectacular failure at the subject ?
Map Snapper Still its good to see Ordnance Survey Research Labs joint research with Southampton University making this weeks New Scientist as well as Computer Weekly.

Map Snapper is a demonstration of technology that brings together the best characteristics of paper mapping and geospatial databases. Using a camera phone a photo of any feature on the map is sent to a server application which “recognises” the feature using pattern recognition and return up to date attribute information..

So take a picture of a hotel, and find out its telephone number, rates and this evenings reservation information, or take a picture of a train station to find out the time of the next train.

One way to think of this is a mash-up tool for paper maps !!

Map Snapper is a great example of collaborative research, the real challenge now is to find partners to commercialise the idea…