[Geowanking] more google and gis

[Brian Lalor]

On Jun 15, 2005, at 3:52 PM, Mike Liebhold wrote:

>> By the way, I guess I missed why big business is ruining open  
>> source GIS (sic).
>
> This is a delicate moment, just before the boom. It's possible that  
> enthusiam for google maps could dilute attention from lots of other  
> important grassroots and  open mapping projects just gaining  
> critical momentum, that could really benefit from the kind user  
> contributed code and hacks that people are doing with google maps.

I would argue that this is a good chance for those other projects to  
learn from Google and make their products as easy to integrate as  
Google has done!  I don't look forward to the day when Google starts  
embedding ads and whatnot into their maps, but I love that I can  
*easily* (easily being the key word here) visualize all kinds of  
information in a browser.  I'd be just as happy if I could do it  
*easily* with Tiger data.  Google has provided a dead-simple API and  
done so SO much of the hard work for me.

The definition of "easily" is of course dependent on the person, but  
for someone with a limited knowledgebase of geospatial mathematics,  
it's just so durn cool that I can stick an icon on a map at my  
address with 5 lines of JavaScript code.

--
    __   ____
   / /  / __/ Brian Lalor           "If you still have gas, you're  
not lost."
  / _ \/__ \  blalor at bravo5.org             -- Jacques Strappe
/_.__/____/  http://bravo5.org/