North River Geographic Systems Inc

Geospatial Problem Solving

Google

Year in Review: Social Media

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It was a weird Social Media Year. When you advertise as a small business, at least for me, nothing is off the table. I’ve done some incredibly stupid things and some incredibly great things to get noticed. 2015 was a bit of a social media reboot so to speak.

I started a second twitter account. I needed some separation from work and myself. If personally I think Political Candidate A is insane, I will say it on my rjhale account probably.  Is that great separation of personal and business? No. People will still look at my personal account and make a judgement on the southern bearded guy who is likely to say anything. I did tone it down on all fronts though – I have tried to ‘not offend’ as much as I have in the past. People can’t handle it anymore. Social Media is serious business these days so I’ve decided to reel it in some. I got into with a guy the other day on twitter over QGIS. We ended up both simultaneously being jackasses and I ended up blocking him. That was a rarity. Hopefully. I think it was in 2015. Do I have opinions? Oh yes. Are you going to know what they are? Maybe.

I did start an instagram account. I actually started it in 2014 but didn’t ‘get it’ until 2015. I have it linked from my business page but it rarely has anything to do with business. It’s been more of a travelling photo log of places I’ve been and people I see. I’ll keep doing it for a while. I have no great number of followers nor do I care to – it’s just pics of things I find interesting from the “House of Prayer” to a rainy wine tasting event.

A photo posted by Randal Hale (@rjhale1971) on

…and back to twitter…I did meet more twitter peeps this year. You talk to people over this 140 character communication medium and it’s nice to actually share more than 140 characters of conversation with them. It’s people I would have never met if it weren’t for twitter. My greatest outreach is here – and 99% of my customer base doesn’t have an account. It’s communication. It’s rabble rousing. It’s talking.

Google Plus? I really liked Google Plus. I really Liked Google Wave. I really liked <fill in the blank Google Application>. Watching that platform start to tank…or morph…or whatever….it’s really annoying. It’s so annoying I’ve feared for my email (run through google services). Google is huge – but providing a stable bank of software outside of Google Docs/Maps is becoming rare. Yes I’m looking at you Google Maps for Enterprise or whatever and I’m waiting for them to kill Google Earth. I’ve almost dropped off that social platform. I’m debating whether to kill my business page or keep it. Whether I keep interacting with the service or just stop has yet to be seen. It is free though….

Facebook. My nemesis. My foil. I took a year off Facebook. Actually more like a year and a half. I would get notes from people going “WE MISS YOU COME BACK” and the longer I stayed off it the fewer instances of people missing me. Not posting to Facebook but having an account is fascinating. It does everything possibly to pull you back. I finally just deleted my account. I went back. Yeah – I’m one of those guys. I HATE FACEBOOK and then go back. My participation is small. I interact with a few and I mostly post music from youtube. I restarted my business page. I’ll use it for more outreach because of Google Plus doing what it’s doing. Even posting personal information on Facebook is unappealing these days. I dunno – I am more wary of putting my life out there on the facebooks.

I wrestled again with a newsletter. To be honest my customer base is going to see this before anything else. I started analyzing it and removing dead accounts. I found that out of 1000 subscriptions maybe 250 or so were dead addresses. Addresses that were still accepting email but the person had left that place. If you haven’t opened an email for a while and you’ve been on there for two years or more – removed. If you contacted me about a class or something else – I subscribed you. If you don’t like it remove yourself and sorry for the extra emails.

Linkedin. Facebook for Business users. If I see one more motivational leadership pic…..GAH. If you contact me in general I will add you. My contact list grew to close to 1100 people. If I had a dollar for everyone I didn’t know I’d be doing great. Linkedin called me this year and asked me how I used the service and then offered a free professional account for a few months. They were horrified on how I was using it. They expected me to use it to grow/foster original content. I said No – it was secondary. I blog. My blog pushes out information to linkedin, etc. DON’T YOU USE IT TO MEET CLIENTS? No – actually 90% of my customers don’t actively use it and the best thing it does is get me cold called from head hunters or called from out sourcing mapping firms. It’s sort of annoying to be honest but I’m up there. It is free outreach of sorts.

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Still the best thing I do: Blog and The website. On average I get 400 visits a day from something. Depending on how I measure it I should say – Google says 200ish and WordPress says 500ish. The most visited pages are the Tutorials. I’m wrestling a bit to keep them up to date – but I’m getting the hang of it. I blog -> Blog Tweets -> Posts to Linkedin -> Posts to Facebook. I do one thing which is post here and that is most of my advertising. This year the website has generated one phone call a month on average. I’ve had it up and running since 2006. So 9 years for 12 phone calls. If I look at the number of people linking back to my website – reddit, various facebook things, foreign blogs……it’s fascinating. Profitable? Well…….

THE ABSOLUTE BEST THING – Word of mouth. Clients recommending my services to other potential clients. I can’t beat that. I wished a few of my clients were noisier but so be it – they are clients and I will do anything for them. Training fills that need because I can show someone new ways of doing things and sometimes it leads to a new client.

So….two posts in one day? More are coming – I hadn’t got to the personal. That will horrify many and hopefully make you think a bit.

Nothing is Bullet Proof.

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So way back in the day when I actually went to church, about the only thing that ever stuck was “You aren’t promised tomorrow”. I always like that one idea that it might all just blow up today and that’s it. Lends a bit of excitement to it all.

I get up one morning after a several meetings with a client and shuffled over to the email and pop it open and get the “We need to talk about the Google Maps Engine Option….” email.  My clients are wonderful and different. Some days I do get a bit troubled when you read about (insert giant company here) and they’ve just landed the (insert number with multiple 0s after it). I want the small clients though – I enjoy those because we can do amazing things with tight budgets most of the time. Of course it would help if they were flush with liquid cash.

The worst job I think I ever did was for a client that had made a lot of phone calls and talked to some salesperson and bought about 40k of software. I got a call to “make some analysis” and it was pretty bad because they really had bought about 37k worth of the wrong software. I made it work. Once they had signed off on it I ran. That’s been close to 4 years ago and it still bugs me. The software they have bought if they are even still using it has flipped multiple times – I’m not even sure if it’s still offered as a desktop product.

The last client I picked up is starting at 0. I made the decision to go with QGIS for starters. Once we figure out what they want/need then we start looking at other options or we keep running with QGIS. The one thing we had sorta decided was this was probably going to roll into Google Maps Engine. Luckily we’ve both been a bit slower than normal.

I get up one morning and Google Maps Engine is no more. It’s Dead.  Luckily one of the person’s helping on this job is AppGeo. We talked. There are options for moving forward. There are a ton of options.

There are two that stick out:

I went to go meet with another prospective client and the last words out of our collective mouths were “I’m not worried about Google going anywhere”. They won’t. Their products might though. Google Wave. Google Buzz. I’m slightly concerned about Google Plus.  Google Maps Engine has another year of life support. I think since my career in this field has started I’ve learned AML, Avenue, some VB, ArcPy, Python, and last night was Python for QGIS/Plugins, and I’m just now dipping my myself into Spatial SQL with PostGIS up to my eyeballs.

It’s the problem with the giant companies. You aren’t a priority. Your money is though. You might get billed for a lot of software for someone making a sales quota. The software might just die off one day..or Change. It’s a lot of the heartburn I have on ArcGISOnline. I’ve hardly ever offered that as an option because you get too invested too quickly. Maybe one day I will – who knows. I hate to toss someone off to that and then there’s suddenly a change….and I’m left going “Well – you know – that’s just (fill in the blank) software company”.

I’d rather the process be bullet proof. Build a process so flexible off standards that it can’t die off easily. With my forestry client I’ve developed a process that’s fairly bullet proof. I need to explain it better and write directions but we’ve not had any problems over 2014 with data if we stick to the process. They are happy. I’m happy. Their clients are happy. I get paid.

So what am I doing? Looking at both options. Right now I’m leaning to CartoDB because it’s simple and powerful and I think it fits with the requirements of the client. I can explain it. ArcGISOnline is an option – but I got a bit turned off by the sudden Google/ESRI Love fest. No matter what – it’s the clients decision at the end of the day. I’m just providing a path and options for them to get what they want and not promising 40k worth of software in the interim.

Nothing is Bullet Proof….or promised. Poof. Dead. This software is no more.

USGS Ortho Quads and Google

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It’s one of the things I always end up falling back to are the USGS 7.5 Minute quad sheet. My forestry clients live and die by them even though they are now getting severely out of date – some as much as 30 years.

I stumbled on this the other day – Google has a map gallery. I knew somewhere in my head they did – but as you can see I use it so infrequently I forgot they had one. They’ve teamed up with the USGS to provide a fairly simple way to download the newer ortho quads . To me (and this is just me) the newer maps, while nice, don’t have the same soul as the old ones. They are nice because they are more up to date – but….SOUL……

Anyway I started looking and immediately downloaded the quadsheet in the screenshot – the Wauhatchie quad since that is in my old (or current) stomping grounds. Well – it’s a GeoPDF. I’m sorta torn about that, but after giving it some thought that might be the best way to deliver these maps to the public. Being a GeoPDF and seeing how it has layers – you can turn off the image if you wish.

Without Image and With Boring Tan Contours

geopdfoff

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Image and Boring Tan Contours.

 geopdfon

 

Cool right?

BUT – it’s a PDF.

So gdal to the rescue:

gdal_translate -of GTiff TN_Wauhatchie_20100512_TM_geo.pdf test_ortho.tif –config GDAL_PDF_DPI 300 -co “COMPRESS=JPEG” -co “JPEG_QUALITY=85”

and your favorite desktop GIS software of choice:

qgis

So overall I can get the new ortho quads into GIS desktop software. The tan contours lines don’t lend themselves to great visibility. BUT – this might be a decent addition to some of the work I do. So the point of this story – Arm yourself with GDAL. It does many wonderful things.

Foursquare and Openstreetmap

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I’m an on and off again Foursquare user. I didn’t fully “get it” until I was travelling and needed to find a place to eat. It was then I realized this is more than just announcing you’re somewhere – it’s a discovery tool. Over the last bit they’ve been slowly migrating all of their maps to OpenStreetMap from Google Maps.

Now they’ve announced you can actually add data to OSM – they’re encouraging it. Right now if you’re in the UK, Australia, Germany, or Brazil you can edit OSM data (I assume from foursquare). I’m guessing you’ll be encouraged to add points much like the cloudmade app (which is now D-E D Dead)  and the fulcrum app (which is awesome if I had an iphone).

This is why Google maps is going to end up second in the maps race. Yes – Google Maps/Earth is flashier – but you can’t be keep up if it keeps getting easier and easier to contribute to OSM. I guess we need ESRI to scream “but but but authoritative” or “VGI” just to round out the discussion.

So go fourth and eat and map – you can now almost do both at once now. You might end up with a raging case of “VGI” if you’re not careful.

**EDIT**

Just got a comment and to make sure you see it I’m reposting it here – from Harry Wood

I think it’s not quite as happily tied together as you’re imagining.

The OSM editing features are just about editing features seen in the foursquare base-map. They want to see more streets sketched in from imagery, and more names on streets in cities in Brazil for example. When you add a new restaurant to foursquare, that doesn’t go into OpenStreetMap or vice versa. They’re still running a system which is building a proprietary crowd-sourced POI database, only accessible piecemeal by API.

Also these new OSM editing features are not shown to all 15million foursquare users. It’s only for “super users”. Folks who have dedicated a lot of effort to become foursquare super-users, by doing things like correcting locations of bars & cafes. Even so, this is great news. Some level of integration with OpenStreetMap is better than just viewing our maps. And with these super users now directed to make improvements to the base-map (OpenStreetMap), we can expect some of them to take a deeper interest in our project.

I haven’t actually seen the features. I guess it’s an embedded instance of the iD editor on the foursquare website, and maybe they have disabled display & editing of the OpenStreetMap POIs data in order to avoid confusion (but this is just guesswork).

Maps and Signs

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As we all do, I spend a ton of time with maps. A few months ago I was standing at the corner of Mesple (Mess Plea) and Guavaberry on St Croix. Something wasn’t quite right so I went back to my digital data and double checked it. I was standing at the corner of a wonderful moment.

  • Wrong Street Sign.
  • Had it been right it was still misspelled. It should be Sour Sop

 

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The residents in this neighborhood were an older set. I would guess in their 60’s. I asked around and talk turned to the Hurricane years ago. All the street signs were blown down. There was a neighborhood effort to replace them. Out of every intersection in the neighborhood this was probably one of the last signs standing. All the streets are named after fruit.

If you went to OpenStreetMap the neighborhood was not even there (it is now).

If you went to Google Maps the neighborhood was there except Sour Sap was spelled Soul Sop. They had Mesple right though.

Bing Maps is just as wrong as Google.

ArcGISOnline who pulls from the finest commercial vendors is just as wrong as Bing and Google.

Google Maps

If you use a map – know your data. Except there isn’t any way you would know if this was right or wrong unless you were there. So make no assumptions. Acknowledge that there may or may not be a road there and continue with your work until it is field verified.

I sporadically end up at a school from time to time and I ask the kids what street they live on. I also ask how many fire hydrants are on the street. Go check your street sign!