Geography Awareness Week
Not sure if Hallmark has released any cards for the occasion, but this is Geography Awareness Week. I’ve seen in some of the blogs that Google has a great Geography Awareness Week page with some great sources to people to use. Google even has a nice KMZ that enables you to find Geography Awareness events in your area (is it just me or does that placemark look a little like the OSGeo logo?).
ESRI has their GIS Day page, but it seems to be stuck back in the 1990’s with not much spatial content out on the front page. I’m beginning to wonder if this is more of a marketing gimmick than an actual grassroots educational event; NO references to Google Maps, Google Earth or Virtual Earth 3D on that page. They’d rather you use ESRI branded products which I guess proves my point that this is all about marketing ESRI GIS, rather than GIS as a whole. *shrug*
That said, there are going to be tons of GIS Day “celebrations” (use Google News to find newspaper articles announcing events in your area as the GIS Day website doesn’t have a good events search page, more of that Web 1.0 stuff) around the world and I’m sure Google Earth will be front and center.
Google’s entry into the Geospatial arena is refreshing.
I just got an IM from a reader who says not to forget open source GIS.
I should have mentioned QGIS as a GIS Day solution.
well, that would be a first time for ESRI to doing something like that, huh?
Well I always considered GIS Day above that. At least talking with the folks at ESRI they seem to put GIS as a whole above ESRI software. I’m sure this is just the marketing team getting involved where they shouldn’t be.
I’ve talked before about ESRI marketing getting in the way of their products.
I was just joking. Yes, I think you are correct. The techies that I know are very much software agnostic when it come to GIS Day. ESRI deserves alot of credit for that. They have done more than just about anyone to bring about GIS education.
Dangermond deserve the most credit for this as while he is a billionaire, he has been really good about promoting geography and GIS, even without mentioning his own products at times.
However, the marketers (at least the new breed of ESRI marketers in the last 7 years), are like the old Intergraph marketing and sales staff. They don’t really know much about the product, and don’t seem to care to. They just want to see software – bottom line.
[...] Today is GIS Day! [...]
[...] Panoramio updated their logo back in October so I’m not sure what the logo looked like before as I can’t find it. Now this could all be a coincidence as the process of developing the logo seems innocuous. One might say it is natural to have a compass with a “geo” site, but the similarity has to make some in the open source community a little disappointed. Of course this is the second time Google Earth has been involved with using a logo similar to OSGeo so maybe deep down everyone just loves it. [...]
I have conflicting feelings about GIS-day as well: on one hand educating people about the importance of geography is commendable- but seriously why not just call it ‘geography day’? Every time i hear the phrase ‘GIS day’ I think to myself, “oh wouldn’t the world be a better place with an electric drill day, or maybe a relational database management system day, why not a sewing machine day!?”.
Dylan