GIS Blogs: Where’s the conversation?
Posted by Dave Bouwman | Posted in Blogging | Posted on 12-07-2006
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for a long time, and regardless of your opinion of him, he does have some
insights about blogs and their role in the formation of communities. In his
work, you read a lot about “conversations” and how blogs can facilitate the
conversation with and within a community.
What I’ve noticed is that this
is not really happening on the GIS blogs. The only place you’ll see anything
akin to a conversation is on James
Fee’s blog, and then it’s only when he rips on ESRI, and a bunch of other
people thrown in a “me to!” or “you tell ‘em!”.
I’ve been thinking about
this for a while now… and I have come up with two possibilities (I’d love to
hear others)
Its a Numbers Thing:
Do the other hot blogging
areas (i.e. politics and software development) simply have so many more people
involved that they can attain a critical mass, from which a sort of
decentralized meta-community occurs? The problem I have with this is that there
are 1000’s and 1000’s of people who use spatial technologies, so even a small
percentage should result in more bloggers and readers (who, I’d assume would be
commenters - thus the conversation!). But this just does not seem to be the
case. Which leads to…
Technical Savvy
Is the GIS community at
large simply not technically savvy enough to be “into” blogs in a large way?
Some readers may get a little bent by this characterization - after all, we do
“computer mapping”, which requires us to be technically inclined. Right? Back
when you had to know how to grep your file system to locate that bash script you
wrote to automate mounting and unmounting drives while running a set of kriging
amls - yes - you had to have a certain level of savvy. But, with ArcMap and the
draggy-droppy-love-fest that is model builder, I think we can agree that the bar
has been lowered. Perhaps this is translating into people who don’t “google” a
problem, and who would never find a blog, let alone comment on a post, or start
their own blog. Maybe with IE7, the wide adoption of RSS through Office 12
and Windows Vista we’ll see this change, but for now I think it’s just the
alpha-geeks… and apparently we don’t like to talk with eachother - more just talking (or posting) at eachother.
Anyhow - I just thought this was interesting, but what are your thoughts? Would having the conversations matter?
Are the ESRI (and other) forums enough? Is blogging to arcane for the GIS masses? When will it hit the tipping point?
Of the 20 or so individuals I know well that use spatial technologies, I would be the only one that reads any blogs whatsoever. I think the reasons they aren’t interested include lack of time, a perceived lack of value added, or just lack of awareness that they exist (many don’t even know what blogs are).
As far as no one commenting or getting into discussions, it seems the majority of the blogs I read aren’t necessarily discussion bait but rather pointing out some news tidbit or change in software/services of note. Rarely do these blogs end like your last paragraph.
Hi Dave:
I happened upon your blog accidentally. Would you be willing to give me an assist in a search I am doing for a Microsoft spin-off? It is related to GIS Application development for transportation space.
If you’re willing to give me 10 minutes, please email me with a phone number at which I can reach you, or call me directly at 904-683-7000.
Josie Summa
Redmond Consulting, Inc.
Hi Dave,
Very interesting topic to me (guess why ;-). Two things comes to my mind:
- Maybe we just don’t have (yet?) a critical of geospatial-community people interested in web conversations.
- Maybe there’s too many geospatial blogs which are diluting the number of people ready to invest time in conversations.
Of course, this second point generates numerous questions… are there really too many blogs in the geospatial community? If so, is there is way to reduce this number? How can we improve communication (information and knowledge sharing) within the community?
Cheers,
Alex
A quick caveat that I’m fairly new to GIS (about a year), and been reading the GIS blogs increasingly over the past six months or so. In looking at blogs and commenting generally, I think it might be something people do AT work (and some people manage to convert INTO work), but I don’t think people blog as much ABOUT their work, and for a lot of people (and hopefully soon, me) GIS is their career. Blogs seem to be more about side interests. (I don’t read any really techie blogs, so maybe that’s a hole in this idea) And I guess I’m not including ESRI forums as blogs, because really it’s less an exchange of comments/observations and ideas and more problem/solution (helpful though those are). Blogs where I have seen more activity are on the Google Earth/World Wind sites, which are more of a hobby/obsession, or maybe simply an offshoot of the software development community you mention.
In response to Alex’s last point, I think original point is that the present state of GIS does foster information sharing, but hasn’t led to much conversation. A bunch of reasons have already been mentioned that are reasons people wouldn’t participate. Here’s another way to look at it: what are some things that would compel people to participate more?
My two cents, and brace yourself for sweeping generalisations……
The majority of people that are into the popular tech type blogs are teenagers to early twenties, and they simply do not relate to terms such as GIS/geospatial/spatial etc, they are into ‘cool maps’.
People who are into "GIS" tend to be those of us that have come to learn whats behind those ‘cool maps’, and then start using the "GIS" type terminolgy. However, we tend to be a little older and less used to the net as a social web, its still only an information web.
Therefore, change the language; if you want people to engage with you, you need to speak to them first.
Posting from the future is a sure way to stay at the top of the Planet Geospatial page!
re: posting from the future - my bad. I’m not good with my track pad & the calendar control on my blog. doh!
Great to see other peoples reactions & ideas. I like Anthony’s point
… if you want people to engage with you, you need to speak to them first.
and Matt’s suggestion that more posts solicit feedback. I’ll be trying to add these two ideas into more of my postings.
Maybe the reason I see a lack of conversation is that I rely on .NET development blogs for breaking information on some relativly niche topics - code generation, object data binding, .NET design patters, and "Agile" zen. Adn these blogs have quite robust conversations.
From my (admittedly biased) vantage point, I assume that while there are a few other people out there fighting with the same GIS development problems - and thus I try to put out some relatively technical information, with the hope that conversations can begin around the topics. For my part I’m going to put more effort in trying to foster this, as well as spend more time commenting on other GIS blogs.
Cheers
Dave
Seems like a disproportionate number of right-brained people are attracted to GIS. Since rightbrainers deal better with pictures than words, they find it easier to converse at a user group meeting (where they can gesture while explaining a poster) than on blogs.
This might also explain the shortage of good GIS documentation. Strangely, it also seems like a disproportionate number of the good GIS documentation writers are left handed. Not sure why.
Just to slightly contradict myself a little, don’t change your blog too much as it is still a useful resource.
PS. Guess a commenting system like this is out of the question then ……
http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/#
I have come to GIS from a web design and development background. I’m often struck at how similar the disciplines of GIS and web design are: both are deeply rooted in both visuals and technology and, increasingly, interaction. What has struck me even more over these past few years that I’ve been learning GIS (through my work - I’m not a ‘trained GIS pro’) is the lack of community, particularly blogs.
Web design is, particularly since the web standards movement took off, absolutely reliant on bloggers to move, shake and educate the industry. I was there when the first bloggers started blogging, before RSS and weblogging software or even the term ‘weblog’ had been invented. What really pulled me back time and time again to these guys sites was the sense that these people were in the same boat as me - learning something new, exploring the possibilites, making mistakes and sharing the outcomes. This is something I still don’t see on GIS blogs; there isn’t any sharing of neat ideas, techniques, or cool stuff. There’s plenty of quite dry commentary, but not enough nuts and bolts ‘how tos’, tutorials, hints, tips and general sharing of knowledge. Ironically, there’s more of this kind of knowledge sharing on web design blogs, where designers and developers are testing the waters with the likes of Google Maps. Could this lack of community in the GIS be that thing of protecting professional knowledge? In other words, by sharing knowledge, there’s the perception that you’re giving away your competitive advantage? I don’t know. What I do know is that blogs *are not* read only by teenagers with time to waste. In the web design space, they’re an essential professional resource and without them, the web, I’m sure, would be nowhere near as far forward as it is now.
Here’s to the emerging GIS community!