John Lenders, Victorian Minister for Information & Communications Technology, has just announced “App my State” mashup competition with $100,000 worth of prizes. It will be officially launched in late February so full details are not yet known.
It is a third such initiative within within a period of 5 months. First off the rank was Government 2.0 Taskforce with Mashup Australia competition (I featured many entries on this blog in a series of posts: winners of mashup competition or highlights part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4). Then late last year NSW government announced its own version of the contest: Apps4NSW (initially it was scheduled to end by 6th February but deadline was extended til 22nd March to allow more time for student entries). Other States will inevitably follow soon, not to be outdone.
Despite all of these initiatives and associated drive to free government data under Creative Commons licence, we are yet to notice any impact on the availability of useful applications. Majority of data released so far via, for example, data.australia.gov.au portal or data.nsw is only of marginal information value and mostly not in “ready reusable” formats. (How about property sales or vehicle registrations stats, Guys? Or cadastre boundaries and address database? That would really show your commitment to the cause! Otherwise it is just playing on the fringes...)
The benefits of all those competitions to the community and organisers will be directly related to the quality of data supplied. The two portals mentioned above highlight however one enormous problem that many tried to solve in the past , with various level of success: that is, consistent cataloguing and description of available data (via structured and standard compliant metadata) and simple way of discovering what is available (thematically as well as geographically). Google may offer some assistance in addressing this issue with simple yet powerful concept, as suggested by Ed Parsons. However, there is even bigger problem that should be addressed in the first place – national consistency of available information! You only need to look at how bushfire information is disseminated by each State to howl in despair… but it only requires 8 guys/galls to find a common ground. Maybe some money could be spent on such initiatives rather than on competitions where participants have access to only marginal value data?
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Recap and new resolutions for 2010
Last year finished too abruptly for me and it is already end of January 2010! It looks that time is not going to slow down at all… So, without further ado, back to daily chores. But firstly a quick recap of where the things are at.
2009 was a year of trials and errors. My overall goals were modest but I found so many exciting things to explore that I have gone off the main track a few times too many.
My primary goal “…to complete and deploy core functionality modules, including point-of-interest/ local search and driving directions” for aus-emaps.com is still in progress. Implementing fluid DIV elements to fit dynamic content is proving a challenge for a page which already has a complex structure. Development time on all my pet projects has totally blown out of proportions and several major functionality and content improvements are still only in partly finished state, not ready for deployment. A few blog articles I promised are still at early draft stage as I could not find enough time to finish them. My experiments with Twitter and online player for YouTube videos have gone stale although there is still a great potential there, only if I can put some effort into implementing improvements. Too many ideas, too little time…
However, on the positive side, free weather widget is proving very popular (just reached 70K loads a month and traffic is growing fast). This blog, although attracting only a modest audience of 1.5-2k visitors a month, already has Google PR 5 rank (which demonstrates clearly the power of quality links!). Cooperation with Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania helped to rise the blog’s profile significantly and contributed some traffic to featured articles. Search engine traffic is growing steadily and many aus-emaps.com pages are in top 5 spot for several attractive keywords. Overall traffic to my mapping site has grown at a double digits pace in the last year and general pickup in online advertising spent is clearly evident on my monthly Adsense statements.
The theme for this year will be “FOCUS”! I have one great new idea that brings together many of my experiments, into a single, powerful and unique application concept (with online and desktop potential, as a freebie and software-as –a-service option). I would like to bring onboard a team of developers to help me reach 2010 milestones at acceptable pace so my concept “number 1,367” can be launched as soon as possible. Stay tuned!
2009 was a year of trials and errors. My overall goals were modest but I found so many exciting things to explore that I have gone off the main track a few times too many.
My primary goal “…to complete and deploy core functionality modules, including point-of-interest/ local search and driving directions” for aus-emaps.com is still in progress. Implementing fluid DIV elements to fit dynamic content is proving a challenge for a page which already has a complex structure. Development time on all my pet projects has totally blown out of proportions and several major functionality and content improvements are still only in partly finished state, not ready for deployment. A few blog articles I promised are still at early draft stage as I could not find enough time to finish them. My experiments with Twitter and online player for YouTube videos have gone stale although there is still a great potential there, only if I can put some effort into implementing improvements. Too many ideas, too little time…
However, on the positive side, free weather widget is proving very popular (just reached 70K loads a month and traffic is growing fast). This blog, although attracting only a modest audience of 1.5-2k visitors a month, already has Google PR 5 rank (which demonstrates clearly the power of quality links!). Cooperation with Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania helped to rise the blog’s profile significantly and contributed some traffic to featured articles. Search engine traffic is growing steadily and many aus-emaps.com pages are in top 5 spot for several attractive keywords. Overall traffic to my mapping site has grown at a double digits pace in the last year and general pickup in online advertising spent is clearly evident on my monthly Adsense statements.
The theme for this year will be “FOCUS”! I have one great new idea that brings together many of my experiments, into a single, powerful and unique application concept (with online and desktop potential, as a freebie and software-as –a-service option). I would like to bring onboard a team of developers to help me reach 2010 milestones at acceptable pace so my concept “number 1,367” can be launched as soon as possible. Stay tuned!
Monday, December 14, 2009
MashupAustralia Winners Announced
After a month of deliberations, the winners of the contest for the Best Australian Mashup were finally announced. The overall winners, receiving $10,000 in prize money, are Suburban Trends and Know Where You Live (both were featured on all-things-spatial blog in the last few weeks: mashups pt 1 and winners of GovHack contest).
Judging panel citations:
Notable Mashing Achievements ($2,500 prize) were awarded to:
Best Student Entry and $2,000 in prize money was awarded to Suburban Trends (yes, again) and Suburb Matchmaker:
People’s Choice Award and $2,000 in prize money went to In Their Honour, with the following citation: “The clear winner of the People’s Choice Award was In Their Honour — which is consistent with the judge’s thoughts on its usability. As commenter Nerida Deane said, ‘I just looked up my Great Uncle Al and found the site easy to use and I liked the information it gave me. Maybe one day I’ll have a chance to visit his memorial.’”
Student Entry — Commendable Effort ($1,000 prize):
Transformation Challenge ($1,000 bonus prizes for mashups which enhanced and/or made the provided data available for reuse programmatically):
Congratulations to all the winners and pat on the back for tens of other participants who submitted great entries for this competition! Full story at manshupaustralia.org and gov2.net.au blog.
Judging panel citations:
“Suburban Trends - a mashup of different types of crime and census data that allows to compare and contrast suburbs by a range of economic, education, safety and socio-economic indicators. The judges thought the ability to compare suburbs visually combined with the selective choice of statistics was excellent especially in a field dominated by many entries using similar datasets.“
“Know Where You Live - This entry bills itself as a prototype of a mashup of a range of open access government data based on postcodes so that you can truly know where you live. The judges loved the very citizen-centric ‘common questions’ user experience of this app and the groovy, and again, selective repackaging of what could otherwise be considered (we’ll be honest here) slightly boring data. The integration of publicly-held historical photographs and rental price data was a nice touch as was the use of Google’s satellite images in the header. Judges were disappointed that some of the data for states other than NSW wasn’t available for inclusion. The focus on compliance only with the most modern standards compliant browsers was not seen as detrimental to this mashup.”Highly Commendable Mashup award and $5,000 in prizes went to geo2gov (an online service that accepts location information in a variety of formats, like address, postcode, lat/lon, IP address, and returns data on that locations as JSON feed) and Firemash (mashup of relevant twits and New South Wales’ Rural Fire Service RSS feeds; it sends twitter alerts for registered users if fires are reported in the vicinity).
Notable Mashing Achievements ($2,500 prize) were awarded to:
Best Student Entry and $2,000 in prize money was awarded to Suburban Trends (yes, again) and Suburb Matchmaker:
People’s Choice Award and $2,000 in prize money went to In Their Honour, with the following citation: “The clear winner of the People’s Choice Award was In Their Honour — which is consistent with the judge’s thoughts on its usability. As commenter Nerida Deane said, ‘I just looked up my Great Uncle Al and found the site easy to use and I liked the information it gave me. Maybe one day I’ll have a chance to visit his memorial.’”
Student Entry — Commendable Effort ($1,000 prize):
Transformation Challenge ($1,000 bonus prizes for mashups which enhanced and/or made the provided data available for reuse programmatically):
Congratulations to all the winners and pat on the back for tens of other participants who submitted great entries for this competition! Full story at manshupaustralia.org and gov2.net.au blog.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Maps in Viral Marketing
A quote from the Australia Coastal Watch website reads:
This is a fake of course but a very interesting example of a low cost viral marketing campaign for a TV program that plays on people’s fascination with “unusual things” captured on Google Map satellite imagery. I have spoiled the fun by describing what it is all about but the key point I want to make is that maps have such a wide range of potential applications - limited only to one’s imagination!
Related post: Adding value to free online maps…
First spotted on: Google Maps Mania
“Unbelievable Satellite Images! Recent images of Bondi Beach show a massive school of unidentified sharks cruising just metres from swimmers. Click the plus symbol to zoom in…”
This is a fake of course but a very interesting example of a low cost viral marketing campaign for a TV program that plays on people’s fascination with “unusual things” captured on Google Map satellite imagery. I have spoiled the fun by describing what it is all about but the key point I want to make is that maps have such a wide range of potential applications - limited only to one’s imagination!
Related post: Adding value to free online maps…
First spotted on: Google Maps Mania
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