Paleogeography vs Neogeography

This was a common topic of discussion at Where2.0.  During my monthly email box clean out, I noticed that my GIS-L listserv mail was practically non-existent.  So I compared it to the Geowanking email list traffic. Here are the results:

Number of posts at GIS-L is definitely trending downward in comparison to the number of posts at Geowanking.  Before doing this analysis, I did a quick check of the archives and twittered this:

@spara: #wherecamp GIS is dying.  May listserv stats - gis-l: 2 messages vs geowanking: 99 messages

Dave Smith replied:

@DruidSmith: @spara GIS-L isn't the only trad. GIS listserv out there, ESRI-L, ARCVIEW-L, NEARC-L and others exist and have good traffic.

@DruidSmith: @spara Not to mention may other platform-specific ones, like GeoServer, GeoWebCache, Google Maps listservs...

All good points, but I compared GIS-L against Geowanking because they are the predominant generic geospatially oriented email lists.  Other email lists are focused on a specific vendor or software, so  I thought comparing GIS-L to Geowanking was a more apples to apples comparison.

The data is here if you want to do more analysis, and if you want to gather the data on other email lists, below is a one line bash script to harvest the number of messages per month from a Mailman list archive:

while read line; do url="http://geowanking.org/pipermail/geowanking_geowanking.org/$line/thread.html"; /sw/bin/wget -q -O- $url | grep 'Messages:'  | awk '/<b>Messages:<\/b>/ {printf $2}' | awk '{sub(/<p>/,"\r");print}';done < dates.txt > geowanking.txt

To run this: 

1. replace the url to the url list archive of choice, note that the date is held in the $line variable
2. create a text file call dates.txt with the year and month formated as year-month (2009-May) with only a single year-month entry per line for the time period you want to compare
3. redirect the output for to the file of your choice ( > myoutput.txt)

It would interesting to see a comparison of email list traffic between open source and proprietary geospatial software. 

additional geowankery

Google Maps can only handle KMLs with points, lines, and polys. Ground overlays are strictly verboten. However, you can overlay images in Google Maps using mapplets. The process is simple and well documented. The basic steps are: 1. write your mapplet, the example below contains all the tags that the example on google doesn't show for your cut-n-paste enjoyment: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <module> <moduleprefs title="1929 Map of San Antonio, Texas" height="300"> <require feature="sharedmap"> </require></moduleprefs> <content type="html"><![CDATA[ <small> This is a georeferenced map of San Antonio, Texas in 1929. The original map is at http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/arc/maps/images/map1052a.jpg </small> <script> var map = new GMap2(); map.setCenter(new GLatLng(29.4208378,-98.4938900), 12); // ground overlay var boundaries = new GLatLngBounds(new GLatLng(29.3400022,-98.5543116), new GLatLng(29.5016733,-98.4334683)) var oldmap = new GGroundOverlay("http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/arc/maps/images/map1052a.jpg", boundaries) map.addOverlay(oldmap) </script> ]]></content> </module> 2. Upload your code to a server or to Google page creator. 3. Install it on Google Maps directory. 4. Share the map using a long url like this: http://maps.google.com/ig/add?synd=mpl&pid=mpl&moduleurl=http://www.geouptime.com/mapplet_san_antonio_1929.xml Google will ask you if you want to add it to maps (I assume it means your maps). Clicking on Add it to Maps opens the mapplet. Voila!