Perhaps. While some more time might be required for thorough understanding of this comprehensive topic, the fact sheets are quite informative and would be useful as a reference for managers and people who have to related to GIS experts and who need a strategic overview rather than painstaking detail.

Download the fact sheet GIS Tutorial 101 in Ten Minutes and have a look for yourself.

Above: the planet Earth, and with it; the Internet, as seen from the moon (“Earth-Rise” image courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre web site)

A question I have pondered on quite a bit since I first took an interest in the World Wide Web is where to put my energy and creativity as a writer to best use while online.

In my case, the primary objective of my web page is to serve as some kind of online journal, or information archive for myself, if you will. I have no great aspirations for my personal web page to serve any other purpose. Thus, I believe it to be sufficient the way it is.

However, some Internet writers may be driven by a justifiable desire to be read. That is less likely to happen if you write exclusively for your own homepage or blog the way I do!

To direct traffic to your blog you need to keep it up-to-date at all times and blog about something that is of relevance. That, or you could bet all your money on single pieces of killer/funny content and hope to get caught by social bookmarking or surfing sites like e.g. del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

Either way you also have to market your content in other ways than merely through search engine optimization. Things to be considered includes online marketing but equally important links and “snippets” from other popularly read information sources such as high-profile media web sites or blogs (e.g. BoingBoing, Gizmodo) which are likely to send more traffic in your direction.

Similarly there is a long range of semi-open web communities where you can contribute content such as Flickr, Facebook, VirtualTourist and the Internet Movie Database to name but a few. All these communities already have a solid user base and it is likely that whatever you write on these sites will be read by a far greater amount of people than what you write on your own web site/blog. At the same time as you contribute content to these communities you can post the same information on your own website/blog. Multi-site-publishing is not a crime (if it is YOUR content) and spreading your content is likely to drive further readers in your direction.

A viable option is not to have your own web site whatsoever and exclusively base your Internet presence on contributing to other sites. The only drawback of this approach is the lack of an archive of all your writings / materials – but I suppose you could solve that the same way freelancers have (or haven’t) done for ages – in some manual way.

This approach would most probably secure your web presence but would at the same time take away the pleasure – and (perceived) security – of rolling your own!

Etter å ha prøvd talrike gonger å få endra ei oppføring i Telefonkatalogen via noko så passande som telefonen freista eg i dag “kontakt oss” tenesta på nettsidene til Eniro.

Eg nytta Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6 og alt virka som det skulle – fram til eg freista å sende inn skjemaet når det var ferdig utfyllt. Dette er naturlegvis det mest irriterande tidspunktet eit skjema kan skjære seg på – etter at eg har fyllt ut alt.

Eg tok meg bryet med å fylle inn noko i alle felta fram til og med ‘fakturanummer’ der eg skreiv inn ein serie nullar. Då fekk eg til alt overmål opp ei feilmelding “processing error” med to undertekstar, ein på Engelsk og ein på Tysk med litt ulikt innhald.

Eg skifta til å syne sida i Internet Explorer – då fungerte det på fyrste forsøk. Det er forsåvidt hyggjeleg, men kan de ikkje berre skrive Javascript som fungerer på kryss av nettlesarar – det er då ikkje så vanskeleg. Særskilt ikkje når ein tenkjer på kor mykje pengar de nyttar på denne tenesta dykkar!

Back in 1999/2000 a social networking site called eCircles was on the rise. A group of friends including myself had started to use eCircles for the purpose of maintaining social relations, putting up shared message boards and even for writing a novel. In most respects, eCircles was near identical to the social networking sites of today. And it was functioning very, very well for us. One of us was going to university over in London, another was in South Africa and the rest of us were distributed around Norway.

Then in early 2001 it was announced that eCircles.com would seize to be and that services would be shut down permanently on the 15th of April. All content would go away with it.

There wasn’t any easy way to export content from eCircles except to go through the site item by item, browse it and copy/paste it into another application. Also bandwidth wasn’t what it is today back then and the process of retrieving all the content was hopelessly slow and inefficient. Additionally, there was nowhere else to put the content online once you saved it. And so most of our content was lost never to be seen again.

Since then I’ve become extremely cautious of hosted services on the Internet. I want to control the server-end of things myself or have someone I know do it for me. For this reason I do not put a lot of content into Orkut, Friendster, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces or Facebook. Because they come and go.

Once an online service gets shut down for this, that or the other reason, it takes more than just a simple reinstallation to get back on track. With the service gone the content is gone with it and thereby the efforts put into the system from my side.

Instead of running my blog off a hosted blog site on the Internet I’ve therefore chosen to run my homepage off a local server. This way I can control things, I can take action if something goes wrong; in short – I trust the service.

So what am I missing out on? Marketing of for one. Had I written my blog on an online blogging platform, the number of readers prone discover and take interest in my blog would be much greater than what is the case with my detached system.

But thats the price I pay.

All the articles from my old web site blog are still available off these pages but may suffer from some design issues which I may look into over time!

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Asgjerd vart hekta på bruk av Internett kring årtusenskiftet. Ho overtok då ein nær ubrukeleg bærbar PC som, på særs gode dagar med lageleg vêr til naud, kunne nyttast til å sende e-post.

Etter sterkt påtrykk frå ein av dei udugelege og lite hjelpsame sønene sine freistar Asgjerd seg no med eigen blogg på verdsveven. Målestjinga med dette er å finne eit alternativt publikum å lufte frustrasjonar og gleder overfor når avkomet ikkje kan, eller vil, ta telefonen.

…

Så då er det berre å besøke den: http://asgjerd.bergheim.dk

However, it also says in the mail that I am not supposed to tell anyone just yet… So forget I mentioned it will you…

The main point I would like to make is not one that will place me in this or that camp as a keen follower of a development philosophy. It is a much simpler one.

The licensing of software says something about your possibilities and limitations of using it. What the license does not reveal is the quality of the product.

Ultimately, the only way of determining the quality of a particular piece of software is to try it out.

There is good AND bad software in both licensing schemes!

The earliest quotation that mentions the topic dates back to 2004, but the problem ought to be increasingly relevant by now.

With new social networking sites launching every week, some users have fallen prey to “social networking fatigue,” as their inboxes are flooded with dozens of invitations.

—Adam Pasick, “More than love to be found on networking sites,” Reuters, February 25, 2004