You're listening to episode 755 of A Very Spatial Podcast, February 16th, 2025. Hello and welcome to Podcast. I'm Jesse. I'm Sue. And this is Frank. Unfortunately, Barbara is under the weather with what I'm getting over, so she won't be joining us today. Guys, it's gotta be one of us at some point in time every month. Until we get to the summation. I blame, I blame my father for, to put it on the record, cause he came over for my birthday with a cold, and I didn't want that birthday present.
I got it. It's the one that keeps coming for a while. That's right. Things are still things in the United States. And part of that is that we, we keep seeing more disconnect from social media. I think what are other people seeing this to some extent, my imagining it. I would not disagree with that statement. I think that there's a lot more. The word I want to use is targeted. I don't know if that's the right word.
People are picking very specifically what they want to use for very specific purposes and then not engaging in others. Okay. Yeah. Especially when it, it seems to feel like it's overwhelming. People are stepping back and trying to, I guess the better word would be deliberate. Deliberate. Yeah. Yeah. Within that deliberation, Bill Dollins and in conjunction with James Fee, who occasionally do a podcast as well they said, you know what planet geospatial was this awesome thing that had existed.
It was the place where we all went whenever it wasn't the social media that we recognize today, but the I guess we'll call it new media before that of blogs and early days of podcasting and videos and those types of things. And so RSS feeds. Places to go to find out things. And so in recognition of you know, 20 years of that on top of anything else, Bill stood up geofeeds. me, find an RSS reader, go over to geofeeds. me slash feeds and put that into your RSS reader and get the curated.
List of geo blogs that have been put up there and I'm sure this is going to grow if you do have a blog reach out either to bill on his mastodon threads. I assume he's on blue sky to he is. That's where I found out about it. Or at least somebody posted it there. Geo musings blog Geo babbler Everywhere else and you know, let him know that you're doing something that you want people to be able to know about. I think he's doing sub stacks as well. So yeah. So go over, check it out.
I think maybe it's time for us to get back into long form social media slash new media slash whatever you want to call it. We'll just call it blogging as well. I think we should do it. I agree. And I'm not saying like we're not necessarily going to do books or anything on this type of thing. Let's see who wants to start a cereal, which she's been threatening occasionally. Okay. We even have a different kind of different kind of books.
Oh, no. Oh, you've oh you're shifted from the cartographers core to I'm not sure that that you know novel ask stuff is appropriate for you do it as serialized. Never mind So good like old school we may we may get back to that. So, you know, head over to veryspatial. com in addition to wherever you're finding the podcast to see if we actually are posting.
And I'll try to make sure a good bit of it ends up reposted to Mastodon and Blue Sky where we, we repost our, our stuff to on Very Spatial, including the blog and podcast. And I guess Facebook too. I think it still goes there. We still post on Facebook. I have not gone to Facebook in a long, long time, so I assume it's still working, so if anybody else who does go to Facebook, Sue, Frank, let me know if that should show up.
Yes, but the way the Facebook thing works, you never, you're not consistently going to get on your feed. But you can go too very spatial. I can't go to the page, yes, or just say that in general. When I glance at it, I'm glancing at the feed, not going to specific. Yeah, it's, it's awesome to see that there. And first up in the news mentioned not too long ago that. The OpenStreetMap was recognized as part of the digital public good.
Recently, in the last couple of weeks, Quantum GIS, QGIS, has also been recognized as part of the digital public good.
And so this, of course, means that they were recognized as a project, a product, that Is, you know, working towards a broader sense of inclusiveness in terms of making people giving them tools that they need to be able to make decisions you know, tying into things like the SDGs and tying into community and, and all these different aspects, but it's just really awesome to continue to see or to see another project within our Industry reaching that level
and I think it's great right that we continue to see those resources out there that non profits and other groups can use leverage to do the work that they do and if you're interested in Seeing the whole list of resources available. You can go to digitalpublicgoods. net And see their registry, so the DPG registry. Digital public goods are great. I'm not a fan of QGIS, but I'm glad that it's being recognized as having an important role.
As we see more people moving to Mac, or even more surprisingly, lots of people are moving to Linux, I think. Just a step away from Windows and such. So this gives you that option, then, if you're moving to one of these other platforms, to still have your GIS that you need for day to day work. I, I'm tossing out the, the question of the role of a name Toponyms quixotic. Mercurial. I, what do we, do? We have thoughts on this? So, to, to contextualize since we, we don't have sound yet.
We have Gulf of America, the renaming of Fort Bragg to a different brag than the original Bragg. We have Denali being changed. Oh, I think so. There's different kinds of things going on, like to talk about it all, but it's not uncommon to rename things to serve and a viewpoint agenda.
But when you do things that are not within your territorial boundaries, you know, that's, that's, I mean, it's interesting, like I you know, spoke to my students who said, look, there is no official international body. That decides those things right at that. So conventions can be compelled within certain borders like by saying if you're a company or whatever that operates here, you have to use this. But beyond that, it's not.
There's no, I mean, you just, you could do whatever you want, again, within your boundaries if people could choose to do it, but there's nothing to compel you. But for those of us living in the side of the United States, are we compelled? No. I mean, there's no legal statement to say that we have to make maps that say a certain thing. An executive order does not convey that. The GNIS, Geographic Names Information System, does not do that.
Now, if you download the data from GNIS, it will now have these names that have been updated. In it, but there's no legal requirement yet. There are many organizations that are quickly getting on board with this. And of course, that's a whole separate thing. Now, some of them, because if they don't do it, they face even weirder backlashes. But I do not plan on, on changing my map labeling and things like that in the near future. So, all I have to say is Istanbul was Constantinople.
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople. So to Sue's point, is that these things happen, change a lot, and really Yes, but how long has Constantinople been Constantinople? One, I just wanted to have the opportunity to introduce they might be giants into the conversation, but my point being that place names do a lot of things, obviously, but I think more importantly not more importantly for this conversation to your question, do we have to call it?
This do we have to call Burma Myanmar or Myanmar Burma? That is a function? Hmm, I'm trying to not get myself into a deep hole here So I'm just gonna say it and then swim out mostly this is about so we know where we're talking about Right. So when I say this location and you go, yeah, I know where that's at You know, we can meet there, we can reference that or whatever it may be, that's to my mind, the first function of a place name or one of the base functions of a place name.
There is a lot of other things that are associated with that, like identity, connectivity and all that other stuff like that. And I don't want to discount that whatsoever, but I think that fundamentally. It's easier for us to communicate if we're talking about the same places in a way that we both know what that is. And I got an early introduction to this when I was in high school.
My grandparents moved from the house that they had lived in for most of my entire life because I think moved in before I was ever born. And they built a new house and I had, I was, I had my license at that point. And my parents were trying to tell me how to get there because I'd only ridden there a couple of times and I was driving and they go turn, go down to a place that used to be windows and hang a left. And I was like, What's a way knows like it's a bar. It used to be called windows.
It's not called that now. It was called. And when I was there was called like the civil rocket or something like that. I have no idea what it's called now. The point is, is that name has changed, but it was a good, useful marker for them. And I made fun of them for years about this, because how can I go to a place that isn't marked and I've never heard of, but it's a very good cultural point for both of them to understand navigation mechanically. I think if I say Gulf of Mexico.
Most people know what that is, so I'm not terribly worried about calling it Gulf of America. However, I am, as you know, Very Spatial South is as well, in a state that is a little more on board with some of these changes. Let's just put it that way. And if I'm talking to a particular audience member, then I know that that can be an issue. I will call it Gulf of America. I've taken two in classes calling it Gulf of Mexico, which has now been renamed Gulf of America, which is Kluge and Inouye.
Will I change my maps? Probably not. That's easy for me to say, because I don't think I've ever made a map my entire life. I had Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America or Gulf of Mexico on it anyway. So it's not so much of an issue. But if it was in Florida, this would be a big problem, right? Or Alabama. So that's a Talking around the point a lot, but to acknowledge that just like you said, these things are always a bit fluid and they for purposes.
It may be useful to use one set of names versus another set of names. And I think we have to recognize that as geographers. But I agree that for I don't know how long, how long has it been Gulf of Mexico? I don't know. Centuries. Yeah, I say I would assume it's like, you know, since As long as the country has been a country in the United States has been a country. So why not keep, you're going to have to know what you look at a map that was made before I know last month.
So it's kind of, it's going to be around for a while. Either way, we have some toponym shifting that is currently happening. Those of you outside the United States. Apologies while we apparently redecorate our, our labeling systems. And for those inside of the United States who are cartographers, congratulations, you get some extra work because you've got to re label things. Luckily, you probably already have the map. You just have to go through and change the label. It's funny.
I was wondering if GMC is going to change the name of the vehicle to the Mount McKinley. So that's I don't know any other news is this week. I mean, there's a bazillion bits of news this week, but nothing specific for the podcast that are geobased that are geospatial. I feel like there's something. Someone released some software somewhere, but I can't think of who it is and what they do. I also thought that too, but I'm, I'm behind on my news, news feeds.
I will say that, you know, there's extreme, I don't know if you've caught the news. There's extreme flooding in Southern West Virginia, including the county that I grew up in right now. It's been going on for about. Well, 12 ish hours, something like that. And I was presenting at the Capitol for our institution on Thursday and we were showing the flood map on an interactive display.
We got a lot of traffic, people interested in the flood maps and stuff like that, and they're asking where the floodplains come from. And I said, it comes from FEMA ultimately dictates the floodplains. And these are important pieces of information that are getting a little harder to find than they were a month ago.
So. I think that what's going on southern West Virginia this minute just highlights, I would encourage, we mentioned this last week, but I want to encourage everyone that if you have data that you rely upon, please download it and make sure you make a local or your own network, whatever makes sense for you copy and.
So you have access to it because the ability to get that information may not be guaranteed moving forward, and if you need it to do the work you do, it's better to have it at least as a reference point, if nothing else, I will say that perhaps one of the next blog posts I do in the next few days, maybe I'll wait until the beginning of the week is that there's a lot of libraries who are working together to try to capture data. That has been around for a long time.
You can go to places like the, the, not Wayback Machine. What's it called? Internet, Internet Archive. Yeah. And they have some, but there are a lot of academic organizations who are trying to capture this and share the data as a public good, because it, it, it is. It's, it's stuff that was created and paid for with tax dollars and, and is freely available.
So for them to have Captured it and are sharing it again is completely, you know, appropriate, especially since most of these places also have federal Archives as part of their their libraries So I will link that there was a video So maybe I'll embed that and provide links to the different organizations They point out and any others that I'm I come across before then so look for that very special calm And so we'll we'll do that and there's other Blogs and of course
everywhere on social media people are are sharing these type of things But we'll try to create a central place where currently places we know of that are trying to collect and share are available I don't know of efforts, but I'm also hoping that states Are, you know, getting data that pertain to their states at a minimum, at least and having that available, maybe from a state source as well.
Because if we remember, I mean, we remember the years right of amassing a lot of this geospatial data as agencies were being developed and develop their technologies. A lot of times they got data to get started from states. States also, you know, utilized federal data. To get their things going and then these partnerships continue to, you know, I'm thinking of lots of programs like LIDAR collection, all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, I mean, NAEP, the North American Inventory Program is a partnership, you know, state federal partnership. So every state gets that data in addition to the Farm Service Agency slash USDA getting it. And let's not forget, it's funny, I'm the one that's been getting it Landsat. I mean, if you've got access to the, that imagery is massive, you can't get the whole thing. Don't even try, you know, making that stuff available, which is what the, you know, the view to be the state views.
Yeah. Yeah. The state views did. I mean, that's still, that may be a critical piece to, to revive in some capacity. So that's it for the news, I guess. Starting from QGIS public good to go find some data. A couple of weeks ago, actually, yeah, last time, we were talking about a lot of things that we go back to. And as part of that, we talked about how You know, there were a lot of books and important journal articles and things like that that happened just about 50 years ago.
So a lot of people who are, who are talking about phenomenology and getting into this pushback, especially against the spatial science aspect, the hard spatial science aspect of geography, that all really Gained a lot of footing in the mid 70s, but if we jump 30 years into the future, we're talking about the mid year 2000. It's just so the 546 of 2000 and we had another explosion.
We talked about some of these things last year, but I just wanted to take a minute to look back again At what's going on this year in terms of our 20th anniversary besides ourselves, of course, we'll talk about it again, probably in July, whenever we do get to our own 20th. But the fact that just under two weeks ago, so just about the same time we were recording, but just after I think Google Maps turned 20 was a lot of the impetus to lead us to start doing the podcast.
But, you know, the opening up of the API. Really change the way that geography was done and very quickly within a year. We had the where 2. 0 conferences We had discussions of what is the term that we used to use neo geography neo geography. Thank you. That's right. Placial remember placial Yeah, that was maybe a year. So later though Which, I think, kind of in its own way, whenever it shifted, became Waze. Waze, of course, eventually bought by Google. It's, it's, yeah.
So what, what do you guys think of that introduction of Google Maps? Just kind of starting there with our, our 20 year retrospective. Before we start getting into some of the other, especially open source things that I'll talk about later on. I actually want to go back five years earlier. To 2000? To 25th year anniversary of selective availability being turned off. Which arguably is the single most important, what's the word? I, we for impediment milestone.
I'm not sure what the right word is for things like Google Maps to, to explode on the scene and do what they can do. So I think that was, that's a piece. I'm just wanna put that as a footnote. 'cause we, a lot of people aren't talking about that. This is the 25th year anniversary for that. It's like the availability going off, but it, it really did set up.
You know, everything that we became available via location based services, I just want to interject that before we started talking about Google, because that's it is its own thing, and it's got its own issues that have nothing to do with selective ability or benefits. We should say not issues. That's an important anniversary to it is. I mean, we have that separation there of.
The things that will help mobile, which again, we have two more years before we really get into that the cutting edge people who were using blackberries to some extent, but also the, the PDAs that you could put in the palm pilots, but yeah, you had the, you had that going on.
At the same time that, you know, we were talking about the APIs and the web interface, so, you know, Ajax coming into and making these things possible in 2004 into 2005 and the adoption of the Slippy Map, as we called it back then. Versus the later location based services, the web and you know, as an evolution of web 1. 0 call and response web mapping, which, you know, existed for at least five years. I think before that, if not earlier. Well, I mean, it was 1.
0. So we can basically say that it's. The 90s. Yeah. So, you know, that slip slidy interface allowed for the dynamicism that impressed everybody, but it also allowed for the debate that happened forever in a day is, is what is Google Maps a G. I. S. And, you know. You would hear people get into metaphorical fistfights about whether Google maps was or wasn't a GIS. And it's not a GIS because of this particular attribute that I think is critical for GIS.
Oh, no, it's totally GIS because I can do these things that you can do in GIS, all that stuff. But it did actually the most important thing that Google maps brought to the, and we should be fair. This is not the 20th anniversary of, of Keyhole.
Right keyhole was before that, but at least a year or two, it brought some of the G. I. S. E. concepts that we all knew in the expert side to the masses that, you know, you can overlay information, you can add layers, you can query a particular point, you can get back more complicated information. That stuff was not that was not. Features of web 1. 0. What do you want? Okay. I'll make a map that has everything you want on it. That was how web 0. 1. 0 worked.
Web 0. 2. 0 in mapping worked as this is what we got. Oh, show me what's there. I can do that. What's here. I can show you that. What's that got to do with this? Oh, I can show you that. How do I go from here to there? Not a problem. You can have this interrogative process that is part and parcel of GIS. It's not everything that is GIS, obviously, but it is part and parcel of GIS. And then people realize, oh, I can do so much more. That I even thought possible.
I mean, that was revolutionary at a level that I don't even think we in GIS, some of us did, but more broadly, quite appreciated how important that was going to be. And I think I would add like to another little thing, right? So you say, you know, web 1. 0, like, you know, tell me what you need and I'll, I'll give you the layers. But for those of us who are professionals are access to layers. And what we thought of as appropriate information was based on what we had.
And so another real revolutionary thing, and I think you were mentioning it, right, is not only then could we have this back and forth, but also with the arrival of the API for Google is we could see what other people really did want on their maps because they could do it themselves. And even if they came back to us and said, you know.
We want to do these things, but now we see that somebody else, hey, can map all the places where I could buy Hello Kitty, right, in the greater San Francisco area, or whatever, whatever crazy thing it was, that aspect of it, the API, the user generated content, was an eye opener too, because prior to that, you know, you had essentially authoritative data layers that were available when, when you had professionals making the maps and then, you know, sharing them via the
internet or in, in more traditional ways. Yeah, I think that that professionals at that time in particular, like I need to make a product that fits as many people as possible. So it's gonna have a bunch of stuff on there that some people don't care about. The one that I always think of is about hypsography, right? Most people don't care about hypsography. Not really at all.
They care about if they have to walk up a hill, and we all know hypsography will tell you that, but most people look at it and go, I don't really understand this and all these little lines and what does this mean? And all that sort of stuff like that. We would put things like that on there or public lands or, you know, Urban area tents and all that stuff that you would see on a traditional DLG sheet, a topographic sheet because, okay, yeah, there's a bunch of stuff in here.
You don't need, but you just ignore it. And then there's a bunch of stuff that other people are going to need. So I have made our product. But the thing that's really fascinating about the API side is that. Like you said, I can say this is what I need and then go, all right, look, I'll just give you what you need. Don't worry about it. And I think it allowed us to start evolving ways of thinking about how to present information to the user as opposed to users more broadly.
Interactivity. We had it GeoMedia webmaps, ArcMap webmap, whether it be ArcIMS or ArcViewIMS or map objects was an IMS. I don't think it was IMS. It was map object. Something it was there's Mac map objects. There's there's map web objects and there was wet web map something objects. Not IMS though.
So. Any of those that you were using, and there were a couple of other companies in addition to GeoMedia and, and Esri that had them, but you had to know it was there first and second, you had to know how the software kind of worked and be willing to wait for it to come to you, because that was the thing, right, is it, it was, it was using separate applications, so you had to have Silverlight or Flash or Silverlight.
Something that allowed you to connect tooth and it was just so yeah, this ability to quickly get information that you wanted and for it to be truly interactive. And so these things before were interactive, but they were interactive for those people who are willing to deal with it. Because they knew what they would get at the end, but anybody from the general public wasn't going to spend the time to try to find things unless they were deep diving. And so Web 2. 0 Web 2. 0 made that interactivity.
The key, like Sue was saying. Yes, and also to, to, to be fair on some of it, right? Google Maps definitely took advantage of the explosion on the infrastructure side where we started to see high speed internet, you know, no longer be just the, the domain of, big companies or agencies or things like that, right? I was trying to remember just for a second, I blanked but it was a DSL, right, in between. So you had dial up for consumers.
When you're at a university like we were, you had access to other, potentially to other ways to get high speed internet that also had a high, you know, a large pipe where you could send a lot of information. But, you know, most people were still dial up right up until the early 2000s. if they had it at all. Well, I'll remember the AOL. Okay, but maybe we don't, right? Because we're talking about a 20 year anniversary.
That's generational, so the kids that are coming, let's say, through college today will not remember the AOL disc that you could buy at the grocery store, right, to get that. But I think that's some of it, too, is that Google came along and took advantage of the fact that more people could access high speed internet, and that made that back and forth, you know, work even better.
So I think that was part of it too, right, is that came along and we started to see the infrastructure changes, at least here in the United States and other places where to truly make things like, you know, a fast moving, fast working web map possible, you had to have that as well. So just to toss in an extra 30 year, in addition to our 20 and 25 year discussions already, you know, we're only about 30 years.
At this point into the internet now 30 years because 9495 is when the Netscape browser became available to you, you know, largely universities, but others as well. And so it was the late nineties, 96, 97, when you had AOL kind of build on top of the Bulletin board systems that have been set up before we get to the early 2000s with DSL and cable and eventually by the time we get to 2010 we're talking about phones with fast enough connectivity to do things.
So sorry not phones, but mobile phones You know even further 36 years Was the first paper 1989 was the first paper written that described what the web should think about what should look like so we don't even have the concept of the web until 36 years ago, you know, we had the Internet, but not that connective tissue, right? So, I mean, these concepts are as an historical context brand new really 36 years ago is nothing in terms of time until we shift it to Internet time.
And then suddenly, you That's 50 every year, but so let's fast forward to 15 years ago, as opposed to 20 years ago, an interesting thing happened and I'm arbitrarily picking 15 years ago because it's an easy number. I don't know exactly what happened, but I lived through it. So I remember it as an ongoing thing.
One of the things I think that we should give Google a lot of credit for is part of this popularization of the ease of making a map, but also the plethora of information that is out there already being out there. So Google went through and figured out, okay, we have to have a map of everywhere. Let's go get a map of everywhere. So they got one and it turns out their map of everywhere mostly sucks because it just doesn't have everything in it. And lots of people went, well, that's not in there.
My house is not in there. You don't have the grocery store. I go to this piece is missing. That's a garbage. Why, why should I pay attention to this stuff? And then Google went, okay, right. This is a good point. We need better data for different places. Let's go find all the places we can get better data. Yeah. And they went and talked to a bunch of companies and a bunch of companies came back and went, well, here's the price tag. And they went, Oh, that's way too much money.
We can't afford that. Can we get.
You know, better data easier and they really pioneered the idea of not the idea, but certainly the, the pioneer, the mechanisms for efficiently pulling together all these different streams of data from all these different sources, some of them commercial, some of them public, some of them, you know, private citizens, putting the information in all these different ways of getting this data in and putting into a holistic system so that for everywhere, I'm using that
a bit facetiously, but for everywhere, I'm using that We can have the best available data and we can also utilize that as a feedback mechanism to figure out where we don't have good data. The criticisms of GIS beforehand were, were that no data, no geography, right? That's a huge problem with the GIS. Well, Google was able to use their large systems and the system to sit there and go, well, these are the places that have crap data and we need better data. We'll strap.
You know, a camera to somebody's back or stick it on a car. We'll, you know, do all these things that we can do to go out there and collect some data level of data to kind of fill in those holes and we'll utilize the, the you know, people volunteering information in some form or fashion into our system. And that is probably arguably the most revolutionary piece. I think of the entire Google thing, which was, okay, we need to have parallel.
And redundant and overlapping multiscalar data collection process that feeds into a singular unit. And I think a lot of people end up emulating that at smaller scales a lot of ways. And that, that was incredibly powerful. It was maddening for those of us who were producing that data because Google was sucking it up. And then the people who are paying us to produce the data were saying, Why am I paying you to produce the data? Google has it. And you had to explain to them.
Google has it because I made it and I gave it to them. That's why and they didn't understand how that ecosystem worked, but it was incredibly powerful Well, I think in a lot of ways we're converging right for the commercialization of data Because we were seeing it in other lots of other places too in this but that's it Right, is that a recognition that there's a demand for more than what traditional official sources could produce?
But yeah, they still had the mechanisms to produce data, but now you see many, many more people wanting it. They want to get up that we, I mean, over the years of the podcast, we talked about this while it was happening a ton of times, right? But, but this was, this was where it really started steamrolling and, and you can, you can remember all the things, right? That, that got started as a result of this.
OpenStreetMap, very quickly among other things StreetView, so you talked about the cars and stuff like that, but briefly there was what was the Amazon one? A9. A9, right? But then there, like, BlockView or something like that. But what was recognized, I think, very quickly, again, is that all these things converge, that people have access, they want to participate in the ecosystem, they want to have mapping, whether they're you know, public agencies, consumers.
You know, people, people everywhere. And so the thing that's got to drive it is the data. And that once that took off, I mean, I think a lot of things that we're seeing across the tech world, right, are, are driven by these trends. And so, you know, we're looking at this historically. So instead of kind of following and seeing what else was going on specifically in 20 years ago, I think You know, looking at how these things are connected across the last couple of decades.
And of course, a lot has happened since then. But it just kind of gives you a glimpse of the impact that something that Google today doesn't Do API keys and things like that. They still have access. They still let you utilize it. But the the way that that happens and the interaction with the maps is a little bit different. And now, of course, there's so many other, as Frank pointed out earlier, open source or even proprietary web mapping services that.
Have taken those early ideas of how people were using google maps and the api And have built a whole other platform. So whether it be, you know, things like leaflet or whole backends either on proprietary or on open source code or you know, just it's amazing where we've Gotten to in historically a relatively short period of time geologically in a blink but in an internet time, it, it is the history of the internet.
And I think, and an interesting thing I just thought of as we were talking about this, if you go back and when we were talking about, you know, geofeeds. me and stuff like that and back to the world of planet geospatial and blogging and is that we in this weird way we're through our.
geospatial social media community, which built up at the same time as all this was going on, you know, documenting micro, micro moments, maybe, and also some of the bigger trends, but things that at the time were just like, oh, you know, check this out. And it was, it's been interesting to me to go back to some of those where you can still find things and see which things actually turned out to be pretty monumental.
And others at the time were like, oh my God, this is going to be You know great and in fact did not catch on and so I think that's interesting too to have Seen how rapidly things, you know were developed to try to catch the wave of what was going on and then what people Latched on to or had no control over right in the sense that wow We because I think you know, I remember when google maps came out, right?
It was kind of like I think like it's thrown out there to see what happens and i'm not even sure they Had any idea what would, you know, what would go on as a result of it? Certainly the G. I. S. community got caught flat footed in the sense of trying to those who are in the inventor spaces of trying to figure out what people are gonna want. I think they got caught flat footed in almost every space. I mean, I really think that the G. I. S. community as a whole.
And they really bought into the notion of exclusionary technology that it takes experts to do, and nobody can really replicate without having that expertise, which was very true at the time, but I think they kind of thought maybe that is inherent to the technology. I really think they got caught flat footed when they're like, well, actually, we can simplify a lot of this stuff and we can produce 60 percent of what you need with no knowledge or input whatsoever.
Beyond how to click on whenever you have a portion of that community, especially from the academic side saying, Hey. We need to open this up. They shouldn't have been caught flat footed. But yeah, I think I think you're right Yeah, and it was it was actually really shocking to me and coming at that time in particular I was very much embedded.
I'm his working day to day in GIS, but my daily work was more broadly computer centric And it shocked me at how much it shocked everyone to be honest with you that I was like, do you not see that? You know, the internet is changing by the minute and that your, your realm was not. Ever going to be spared from that at all. And it really did surprise me how much it's, and it also surprised me how much anger, maybe anger is a little strong, but pushback negative pushback.
Yeah, the better way to say it, that I got from experts in the field on some of the stuff and, and, and indifference too. It's like, well, that doesn't matter. Are you kidding me? This is. Revolutionary do you not see that that that really shocked me. I'll be honest with you. And so Yeah, that's it's kind of it.
I assume Given the last two weeks that perhaps as we are heading towards our 20th anniversary that we will look back more on Those things that got us to the point where we're like, we need to do this, and of course, to eventually sue, sending, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say it was an ICQ message, just to, to date it. It, it could have been it, at AOL. No, we were on campus, so, I don't think it was AOL.
It was whatever was there on the screen, cause as you know, Whichever messenger it was not gonna go out and get something, so it's whatever was there. Yeah, so, go out. And, and, and, and look at the history books, I guess, this world. Well, I still continue to look at my students who are under 20 and say, you have never lived in a world that doesn't have Google math. Well, but that's just it, right? It has changed. And other things.
You know, we all were in front of a classroom at some point in time before cell phones. Before Web 2. 0 hit, and the understanding of how to interact with a map then versus now, things that I don't need to talk about at all anymore. But now there are things that I have to talk about in other contexts. So it's just, it's, it's, it's always interesting how it's changed pedagogically and how just, you know, our own perceptions change. That said, that's it for, for the main topic.
I don't think we have any events per se, other than we encourage you to go out and check out events that are going on. I think last week we, we highlighted a lot of the big ones for the fall. Can I highlight a put out a suggestion for those, particularly United States for an event that's happening more frequently? Which is a lot of times your GIS community or your higher education community will take an opportunity to go visit the legislature of your state and say, this is what we do.
And this is interesting stuff. We do GIS in particular and geography in particular is very visual. It's very exciting. We all know this, it can be very powerful way to talk to legislatures and say, these are priorities of mine. These are things that interest me. These are things that I think that that the legislature should get involved in to take the advantage to do that.
Look for professional groups in your state or look for other groups that you can connect to that are doing this and use your skills. Please to engage with your, your legislators to help drive the agenda, told whatever it is your agenda is. So I'm, I'm. Comment on that, but you have that power and these are happening more and more frequently. Now, please use that in addition to state specific groups.
You have a regional groups for A. S. P. R. S. for Eurasia slash G. I. S. professional network from general geography. Of course, you have the A. G. Regional groups and and others that I'm probably planking on. But yeah, there's Mhm. There's state groups and regional groups working in your state that you can be there with. And of course, your, your clearinghouse in, in cities and counties. And, you know, at every level you can get involved. Oh, and social science history association is.
meeting in November and abstracts are due at the beginning of March. I can't remember to put that in the show notes. That I believe will be in Chicago. Of course, if you want us to add your event to the podcast, send us an email to podcast at veryspatial. com. If you'd like to reach us individually, I can be reached at suetveryspatial. com. You can reach Barb at barb at veryspatial. com, and you can reach Frank at frankinveryspatial.
com. I'm available at Kinda Spatial, and of course, if you'd like to find our contact information, including our Blue Sky accounts, head over to veryspatial. com slash contacts. As always, we're the folks from Very Spatial. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you in a couple weeks. Stars will shoot for me tonight, but to my face. And some die like it's tea. Gators of the in between, singing the oldest song I know, ayy. Red, green, don't matter in the end, they all just fade to grey.
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