Common-Nature

Today I’m helping Mark Brunner of the Missouri Department of Conservation do a workshop on using Google maps at the MAGIC 2008 Symposium.

Here are some links I’m going to use during the presentation. Feel free to follow along

• recmap.org workshop notes
• Information about the recmap or missouri mapping project
• More notes on the project

Maps.google.com

A place we’ve all been to, but did you realize you can pull kmz or georss feeds into it? Go there and type in the following kmz or georss urls.

• http://wildsanctuary.googlepages.com/tour.kml
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/wdinNewsDigestGeoRSS
  (from the NBII..news postings related to wildlife disease issues)
• http://www.common-nature.com/?feed=rss2 (georss from my blog)
• http://api.flickr.com/services /feeds/geo/?id=8753840@N06&lang=en-us&format=rss_200
  (a rather lame photo album of mine on Flickr…pulled via georss feed from Flickr)
  (by the way, get rid of the space after ’services’ when copying and pasting..had to do that to get the link to fit across two lines)

My links on cool Google map apps. and developer links on my del.icio.us account.

So where am I presenting? See the link below.

Show on map

RSS feed readers: What they are and how you can use em.
Josh is doing a great job presenting and I’m busy writing this post via my Blackberry while he’s finishing up the presentation. Turn out is great. We’ve got about 40 here.

Some links to help you get blogging or using other social media:
Before you blog checklist

DMD presentation: The case for social media in government

I also came across Kevin O’keefe’s do’s and don’ts on company blogging, which provides a nice checklist to those getting ready to create a policy.

when to begin

Yes, I’m back after a long spell away from the blog. Today I and Joshua Bullock are polishing off a presentation we’re going to be doing at the Power Up 2008 conference and expo: A conference on Missouri assistive technology.

I will be presenting on why organizations should even be interested in social media. I’ve pulled out the old presentation I did back in June 0f 2007 and realize just how far everything has come in the past year. I’ve changed many references about how people may be using social media to definite statements (e.g., your employees are using social media now)

Joshua Bullock is a great Web designer I work with at the Missouri Dept. of Conservation. He’s one of the best Web designers I’ve worked with when it comes to CSS, XHTML and all things related.

Joshua is going to be covering the accessibility side of things when it comes to using social media tools like Wordpress, and Drupal. He’s come across an interesting observation. While these new Web 2.0 tools are great at presenting XHTML strict and 508 compliant pages to the people who read the pages these tools produce, they aren’t as great when it comes to compliant backend pages. Josh has more on his blog.

The conclusion? I’m thinking here again we have a situation where developers are so busy thinking of how the public uses their tools that they forget that employees or internal content developers may also need assistive technology.

Look for another post on the presentation as well as links relevant to the presentation.

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David Thorne from the Missouri Dept. of Conservation gave a great talk using social media to reach the public. You can read more about his presentation on his site. More on his presentation later.

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I’m in break right now, but wanted to post a couple of important links related to talks at the MNR Conference.

One of them is The Center for Generational Studies. They have some good material for understanding how to relate to next generations in the workplace. Robert Wendover (from the Center) gave a great talk on generational differences in the workplace. Robert also put a special link on the Center’s site for the MNRC containing resources related to his talk.

Louv’s talk was also great (more to come later). In the meantime, check out the Children and Nature Network site.

tag: Richard Louv, Social Media, MNRC

Show on map

I’ve been conspicously absent from here the last 3 to 4 months, but am now getting back into things online. In a future post, I’ll be able to fill you on some of the things I’ve been up to.

Right now I’m posting from the Missouri Natural Resource Conference 2008 down in Tan-Tar-A. Their theme this year: Get Ready for Change: Ensuring Resource Sustainability in an iPod® World (so they’re already thinking about future trends).

The keynote speaker? Richard Louv

More about that later. In the meantime, here’s a great presentation with some great facts about changes in worldwide trends….something to get people thinking about how we can no longer remain doing the same old things to reach people.

While you can’t understand every point made in this slideshow, you can learn some interesting facts about where we’re all going with this fancy schmancy web 2.0 stuff

http://www.slideshare.net/montymetzger/power-of-social-media

It’s also a great introduction to slideshare, yet another social media application…this one dedicated to sharing slideshows.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to get excited about slideshows. However, the interesting thing about slideshare is that when you get thousands of slideshows in one place and vote on them, some really great presentations float to the top.

I’ve already found some excellent presentations on AJAX, the purpose of design in web development, etc.

Check slideshare out and see what I mean.

tag: Richard Louv, Social Media

Show on map

I’ve been busy preparing for the Google maps / GeoRSS workshop at the Organization of Fish and Wildlife Information Managers (OFWIM) conference this past week.

All the stuff we did there you can find at the recmap.org site.

There are a few tools we used at the workshop that might interest some of you wanting to use Google maps as a cheap way to provide maps to your areas (especially if your areas are for outdoor recreation).

One is a tool that will take shapefile data from GIS and provide you with both a KML and GeoRSS file as output. While the latest ESRI product now will export KML files, this tool still has merit since it provides you both with some options and a look under the hood at the conversion process.

Another item is a web page that allows you to input Google map code and execute it on the page. This served as a great tool during the tutorial on how to build Google maps.

Whether you’re involved in getting outdoor recreational activities on the map for the public or just the location of your government offices, take a moment to visit recmap.org and grab some code (or supply feedback or ideas).

tag: google map, egovernment, geotagging, GeoRSS, mapping, Missouri mapping project, OFWIM

At this point, the work on recmap.org now includes the following:

1. Information on how to mark up your areas in the recmap xml
2. A javascript you can deploy on your own site that will read your xml file and produce a Google map with tabbed windows.
3. Information on how to validate your xml file

I’m rather pleased with the javascript since it automatically resolves your correct domain (used when the javascript attempts to get your xml file) and it also successfully deals with IE and all other normal browsers when it comes to working with multiple namespaces in an xml document.

The next steps will be to complete the aggregator on the site. When this is complete, the site will able to periodically query the recmap xml files on community sites and pull their recreational opportunities into one central database.

While this project is geared toward Missouri outdoor recreational opportunities, the tools being developed can be used anywhere.

As always, I’m looking for any input or feedback. What do you think will make this project work better?

tag: google map, egovernment, geotagging, GeoRSS, mapping, Missouri mapping project

Some of the folks involved in Missouri IT recruitment are exploring whether Second Life might be able to reach prospective employees.

I’ve been working with them to design some information kiosks and such. (well, actually, I guess it’s been my Second Life alter ego, Marcus Variscan).
Second Life is a virtual world that has a simple but very cool and flexible scripting language built into it. You can build and code some pretty complex 3d effects with relative ease.

You have to have the client (which is free) and an account (also free) to get into Second Life. Here is a link to where the Missouri IT job fair is being built.

tag: egovernment, Missouri, Second Life

The work I’ve been doing with other folks on syndication of recreational services and facilities now can be found at recmap.org. This is a follow up on the Missouri mapping project I’ve talked about here (although the work can easily be used elsewhere).
The most recent post contains javascript that can pull in an xml file marked up as recmap and display the points along with tabular information.

The goal of this approach is two-fold:

1. Small towns or parks and recreation departments can easily post a Google map of their facilities.
2. Aggregator sites like the Missouri River Water Trails site can periodically poll these sites (subject to approval of the source) and update information relevant to the site.

Of course, we’re always looking for feedback on how to make this system work better. So stop by recmap.org or drop a note here to help or to let me know if you’re using some of the code created here in your own state.

tag: google map, egovernment, geotagging, GeoRSS, mapping, Missouri mapping project