Hobu, Inc.

The materials are located here.

I spent a bit of time talking with Adena about
weblogs and GIS weblogs in particular. I thought I’d give a little background on how I started
blogging, what I’ve found out about blogging over the years, and how I hope to see the
GIS blogging community develop.

Famous among dozens
I think I started a weblog on my university account the day that
Blogger came out. It was some time in late 1999, the
internet bubble was just cresting, irrational exuberance was all around, and Y2K was
rapidly approaching. I had been reading some of the nascent weblogs that were out there for some
time, and two of those that still exist include Scripting News
and Camworld. Some of the same buzz that currently
exists in the Open Source GIS community existed then in the emerging weblog community. People
realized they had created a new medium (or evolved a different one from existing ones, rather).
They were excited about the possibilities and still defining what made a successful
weblog (personality goes a long ways). This was way before RSS, tracebacks, aggregation, and
weblog APIs existed, and the only way you really found out about other weblogs that were
reading and pointing to you was to look through your Apache referrer logs. It was fun, new,
and exciting.

My personal definition of a weblogger is one who digests news and information,
reacts to it, and posts about it. You could argue that a journalist does the
same thing, but a weblogger also injects analysis and opinion into the discussion. But posts
and a website alone do not make a weblog. A weblog also must contain inbound and outbound
linkage to other weblogs.

I continued actively weblogging until sometime in 2003. I would put my flamesuit on,
post about things I was passionate about, and engage in the flamewar about whatever the
current story du jour was. Eventually, however, the entire exercise started to feel
rather masturbatory. Weblogs (of the political or techno-political variety anyway)
tend to congregate and associate with other weblogs of a like mind or temperment. They are
self-selecting (you seek out other like-minded individuals to discuss topics with), and this
limits the scope and utility of the discussion. Once the fervor is gone, there isn’t much
left that is interesting enough to continue posting about. Hence the devolution into posts
about your cat.

Insight, foresight, more sight
The one type of weblog I have seen (and participated in on this website) is where a
topic expert starts to post about his or her domain. Sometimes the weblog author
even picks a domain that doesn’t have much coverage (like a specific form of cancer, tivo-like
devices, or using Python for GIS and starts posting away. These types of weblogs have
the potential to be much more interesting and long-lasting. With Sean,
the Mapping Hacks crew, Adena,
Tyler and others starting to post about GIS, hopefully
we’ll see a thriving GIS weblog community in the coming year or two.

Evolution happens. This was the third consecutive year that I have attended the
MapServer User’s Meeting. Each conference has been electric (really, people are
running out of appropriate adjective to describe the thing). Buzz, excitement,
momentum, cool stuff, connections, and egoboo are all copiously exchanged and
generated at the thing. The first conference was all about realizing you could get
a significantly-sized group of Open Source GIS hackers together. The second
conference in Ottawa was about confirmation of the first, and the Open Source
GIS community started to gain more consciousness. The third, IMO, demonstrated how the
OSGIS community is growing up.

Some examples of how the community is growing up include Frank
receiving the Sol Katz award, the slew (ok, maybe 4 isn’t quite a slew yet) of books
that are starting to show up, and the group thinking about how to circle the wagons
should external pressures (patents, groups with competing agendas, big money) start to
cause trouble.

Frank’s reception of the award (congrats Frank!) demonstrates how the community respects
all of the work the trailblazer(s) have done that have made the formation of the community
possible. I won’t embarrass Frank with any more platitudes, but work like his, Sol’s and
many other pioneers clearly make the whole thing tick. The recognition of this fact by the
community means that it will probably work to grow beyond disparate embryonic projects into
a software ecosystem of (hopefully) non-redundant, mutually-supporting software systems.
There are already some good examples of this, and the OGC work is the ether that makes much
of the collaboration possible, IMO.

Books allow the community to preserve its history, transmit its identity, and
most importantly, to scale. Developers develop. While they are generally pretty good at
describing the intention of a new feature or the steps to follow a technique, they often
don’t have much time for producing documentation that can clearly extract all of their internalized
knowledge about the subject. Authors, whether learning it for the first time or coming from
a perspective that does not worry about every detail (which a developer must), provide relief
to developers. More users can then come into the fray (the support load on the developers
lessens) and the developers can continue doing what they do — write software.

Serendipitously, Dirk-Willem van Gulik of the Apache Software Foundation presented some cautionary tales for the community.
While the software stacks and communities of both Apache and OSGIS have significant
differences, there are some similarities in the problems (legal and otherwise) that
both have to potential to face. As the OSGIS community continues to grow, it needs to
plan and think about these issues, and Dirk’s wonderful presentation gave the community
a language with which to communicate about them.