[Geowanking] goodchild VGI paper

[Mikel Maron]

awesomeness.  you are FakeSteveC?!

I almost thought that last sentence was about me, so I could retire thoroughly satirised,
but then everyone knows the UN has no interest in sheep, 
but actually endangered Siberian Tigers living in the Korean DMZ, duh

----- Original Message ----
From: Stephen Coast <steve at asklater.com>
To: geowanking at lists.burri.to
Sent: Friday, January 4, 2008 6:55:10 PM
Subject: Re: [Geowanking] goodchild VGI paper



On 4 Jan 2008, at 11:56, stephen white wrote:
> Hell, you even have Einstein in a bunny suit! Meanwhile, none of you
  
> are doing anything interesting. It's being left to other companies  
> like Google and Microsoft and Earthmine to actually do stuff worthy  
> of notice, so you may as well pack up your pots and pans and tin  
> foil helmets and go work for the corporate man!

There's actually a fair amount of truth to this, in that that's what  
they think. None of the following is particularly intended as an  
attack but rather that I can understand the different points of view  
and motivations in the current structure of things.

Talking to G is a bit pointless, but other companies don't care much  
about any of us. They're all wedded to the current paradigm which has  
a lot of life left yet. How is OpenLayers going to help Microsoft? Or  
Yahoo? Or whoever? GeoRSS is the most hyped XML snippet you can find.  
OSM's useless as South Bumfuck, Ohio isn't complete yet. Microsoft  
bought their own camera firm and fly imagery, how are a bunch of  
losers with kites and Nokia camera phones at openaerial going to help,
  
really, other than hype and yet another thing you can do with Google  
Earth?

I'd argue that our greatest commercial contribution so far has been  
the hype that they use to sell the dream, and get another 1,000  
downloads of Earth. If you look where the pesos are going it's to  
traditional assets. Lots of money for data, planes, lots of NIH tech.  
The odd free iPod or something if you invent GeoRSS or geotag over  
1,000 photos. In terms of budget, clearly we're just wanking to most  
firms as the dollars are flowing elsewhere. (its pretty unclear to me  
what the autodesk consortium / pyramid scheme actually does or where  
the money goes).


I think the VGI meeting (which was great and I was flying the OSM flag
  
primarily) was divided in to three camps. Web 2.0 firms, Academia, Geo
  
1.0 firms (ESRI, TA, NT, aerial imagery). If you look at where the  
money flows in each, they're all very different. It's Eyeballs for  
ads / service software for web 2.0, the next grant for academia and  
software as product / data services for the latter.

Thus I get the impression that none particularly meshes with each  
other brilliantly. Web 2.0 firms tend to have their own private XEROX  
PARCs and buy people in from academia. Academia wants the next  
research grant but tends not to own anything or be tied to any  
particular set of ideas. Geo 1.0 firms are focused on assets like data
  
and software, the exception being ESRI which is agnostic and doing  
interesting things with the other two sets of people.


So academia is pretty easy, it's the next cool thing to get a grant.  
Clearly there's a lot of cool things on this list.

Geo 1.0 are largely absent apart from personal interests. TA / NT are  
far more interested in getting bought right now than worrying if one  
day OSM will rip the biz model away. I don't think ESRI lose a lot of  
sleep over the latest bizarre open source GIS but there's a lot of  
interesting things they'll do with people who have actual money and  
products (like Earth) for the simple reason that the users want it.

I don't particularly buy the neogeography-for-world-peace line, not  
that it's not worthy. People in disaster zones don't care much about  
pirating software and data so you have a hard time pushing qgis and  
OSM. But maybe next decade.

As far as OSM goes, the longer we're thought of as a rag-tag bunch of  
volunteers the better. Google hired Varian to be their chief economist
  
while everyone else is wondering how to apply chapter 4 of Information
  
Rules to their business and haven't even read Benkler so they don't  
know that peer production is just more efficient than markets and  
firms. So the less research done, and the more hippy we appear, the  
more time we have to complete mapping various sections of the planet.  
Please look the other way and go implement GeoRSS for sheep tracking  
in Earth using kite photography for free for the UN, don't worry  
houses will be much cheaper post-crash so you won't need money.

So it's all wanking, but it's still all a lot of fun.

have fun,

SteveC | steve at asklater.com | http://www.asklater.com/steve/
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