EchoDitto

I use Google Maps all the time. Housingmaps.com, which mashes Google Maps up with Craigslist listings, has found my last two apartments for me. The GPS built into my Helio Ocean has saved me from getting lost countless times in the short time I've owned it.

If mapping software can do all of this for me, imagine what it can do for nonprofits with causes slightly more noble than geo-tagging my Flickr photos. That's what we aim to find out at this month's NetSquared DC Meetup, Mapping for Nonprofits. Details after the jump.

Moof! Apple has released Tiger and all is right with the Mac-loving world. Yeah, I still have to upgrade most of EchoDitto's computers, but at least some of us are living the future. New features abound, from Spotlight desktop searching to Automator to help you do repetitive tasks (as the literature says, "it's like your own personal robot inside of your computer!" -- could we please get a little more meta?).

Just as the Dock was the showroom floor demo to get customers oohing and aahing when Mac OS X came out a few years ago, this time around the Dashboard is where the eye candy is at. With the flick of a keystroke or mouse, a dashboard of widgets swoops into view and gives you instant access to whatever information your heart desires (or developers create). The nice thing about widgets is that they are about as simple to create as web pages, so the bar is lowered for techie-minded folks to get in on the action and start making applications.

The recent release of Google's mapping service has wrought a flourish of creative hacks and other uses of their fantastic GIS and satellite technology.

Among these is the innovative pairing of craigslist and Google Maps that visually interprets craigslist apartment listings, and the nearly over-the-top StompBox, a home-brew vehicle tracking system and mobile hotspot that uses Google Maps in conjunction with Verizon's recently unveiled mobile broadband service.

It's National Poetry Month. So, to kick things off, here's a poem my senior English teacher in high school once read aloud to me in front of the entire class. I'll wrap up the month with another poem, in a blogging take on "Poem in Your Pocket" day.

Data should be the bedrock of any political campaign. But, it's not. I'm not talking about just polling data. Let's face it: pollsters don't want to tell you their craft is limited, finicky, and generally more of an art than a science.

What I'm talking about is customer relationship management style (CRM) data management. Replace the "client" in CRM with "Voter" or "Donor", and you get where I'm going. Minimally, all user online activity, voterfile data, donor history, should have an integrated back end. Then, you should hire a couple of smart people who understand data tools like Crystal Reports and let them tell you what's going on. You might just be surprised.

If you were only paying attention to the front pages and lead stories of the major news media, you would think that 2004 was an explosive year for blogs, which will continue to grow in audience, and that is where the story ends. What has received less attention, except in business and media circles, is the projected growth of online advertising.

BusinessWeek's outlook for 2005 reports a projected growth of 25% in online advertising because marketers will be looking to better target their advertising. As the pressure for better ROI pounds marketers and advertisers, online advertising is an attractive, cost-effective balance to the still necessary, but expensive, traditional print, radio and tv methods. Counting eyeballs isn't good enough anymore.

Earlier in the year, Eyebeam Research launched Fundrace.org. This website will let you type in your zipcode and find out what political campaigns your neighbors have been donating to.

Now, Gravity Monkey has GPS-mapped the data and built a simple PDA application called red | blue:

red|blue transposes the experience of looking up individual campaign contributions onto a Java-enabled phone. With a GPS-enabled phone, the application will take your current location and figure out if you're in a Democratic area or Republican area. The app will also take this information and plot it around you -- in a compass -- to show which direction the money comes from. It's fun to walk or ride about the city, and see how the money changes -- and see how that's reflected in nature of the neighborhood or your surroundings.

Whether this is a cute gimmick or an awesome GOtV tool remains to be seen. I want to hear ideas, people-- how could this or similar technology be put to good use?

(found via Eyebeam ReBlog.)

I get frustrated when people hear "GIS" (geographic information systems) and immediately think "oh, it's a map." Well, yes, it is a map--in the same way that a database is "just a spreadsheet." More importantly, it's a way of interpreting and relating data.

As we, as a society, begin to aggregate more and more data, we're faced with the challenge of using that data in a meaningful way. The task is even more difficult when some of your datasets are incomplete. Let's think about it with the following example--a great use of GIS by the UN.

The most important sentence in that article is that the system "allows users to overlay maps from multiple servers housed at development institutions worldwide to create a customized thematic composite map on their own computer." In one institute, they might have soil quality information for major metropolitan areas. In another, they have the latest population statistics for the entire country. Or perhaps a file that has the address of every power plant. Say you're in charge of reconstruction in a given suburb. Without the map, how would you be able to visualize this information? One person sends you a spreadsheet with soil quality, soted by city. Another one sends you the population statistics, and then you receive a Word document with the addresses. How do you make sense of all this without a single axis that brings them all together?

The visual manifestation of the map--the physical north-south-roads-mountains-cities picture--is not always necessary for interpreation. Imagine that what you really needed to know is whether any power plants were located in sparsely populated areas. You don't even have to look at a map to find this information--the map is just a way of relating the data. The machine can read the map and spit your answer back out at you without you ever seeing a compass rose.

And the most fun part is that once you have the basic layers, finding new data sets is great fun.