On 15/11/2007, at 6:43 AM, Anselm Hook wrote:
aesthetic at work and i personally don't think it serves the community. it is time-consuming and tedious to try to map out listings or try to scrape down craigslist and the like; even with tools like yahoo pipes. i think it should be their job.
I could post a long rant with lots of unflattering comparisons and language that makes people email me in private with sentences like "wow, you're grumpy!". While there is some truth to observations like that, my real motivation is that we all move forwards together. So the way I express my thoughts seem to hinder efforts towards forming or joining some kind of group that can achieve things.
Some of you here have been lucky enough to position yourself at the confluence of events, or launched something and somehow enough things went right that it was a success. There are others that weren't in the right place at the right time. I would nominate Douglas Englebart as one of those unlucky majority. There are people who have done less and had more success. The effort he spent building a demo should have been sufficient to overcome barriers and have his ideas realised.
Yet he was so far ahead of his time that not enough people could make such a large leap of faith, from the system they had then to the system we have now, without the intervening 60 years of progressive implementation. We can look back now and say "yes, Douglas was the one. He was right" - but if there had been an unexpected result in a different way, we would have been saying "yes, Fred was the one. He was right".
So let's look at this from another perspective. I don't think it's anything to do with Craigslist to provide maps. Google shouldn't be providing any maps either. We have computers with us, and we should be exploiting their maximum potential rather than downloading repeatedly from a web site. I don't want to be out in the desert with a GPS and a network connection to look up maps.
My laptop has a large enough hard drive to contain that information, and it is capable of holding that information, and therefore it should hold that information. My eyesight is mine, therefore anything that I see should be freely available to store in my extended memory, which is my computer. Nobody owns my eyesight. I can record anything I want to my computer because it is part of me.
Craiglist can provide enough information so that I can read (or scrape) where it is, and put that information into my knowledge of the local area (or maps). The problem isn't with Craigslist, the problem is that you don't have maps built into your set of computing reflexes, because you're still using a web service for your information.
A command line 'geo 141 abc st, adelaide', or a highlight & right- click 'geo'... but I had to buy the aerial imagery and maps, and cannot share them so the ability to form communities is gone.
Steve. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
