Industry News

Media and mainstream embrace web mapping technology

The current bushfire disaster in Victoria hasve highlighted the emergence of web mapping as a mainstream technology with not only government agencies using it, but also the media and everyday people to communicate.

Online newspapers like the Herald Sun, The Age and The Australian have been ditching the old interactive Flash to track the emergency, featuring maps for to illustrate the fire effected areas, property damage and deaths to provide real-time updates. 

The use of these Web 2.0 technologies also shows the general public's growing familiarity with the interfaces of web maps which are becoming more and more intuitive and offer a wide range of different views including map, street level, photo, satellite or landscape and even user generated maps. 

Web mapping technology also features in the MECC Portal (Municipal Emergency Coordination Centre), a Web 2.0 software package which handles emergency coordination.  The major difference is that an additional level of integration with local government geographical information systems (GIS) provides a greater wealth of information than just Google Maps alone. 

Although council GIS often features greater detail, including the locations of local facilites and infrastructure in sophisticated overlays that user maps don't provide, they also have a very specialised interface which is nearly impossible for a layman to pick up ans use.  So providing end users with a simpler interface is one of the keys to making the application usable for the wider public and something that we've worked hard on MECC Portal to address.  Another issue is allowing users to not only access these maps remotely, but interact with them, including submitting new data, without compromising council IT systems, another issue which MECC Portal successfully addresses.

One day, we'd hope to see the media and general public being able to access real-time information directly from a council MECC.

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LG 3.0 - Collaborative ICT Delivery

The Local Government Technology Solutions Conference is back on at the Sofitel, Melbourne Thursday 14 to Friday 15 August 2008.

At Datalink, we're looking forward to attending this conference.  We've been quite busy servicing this market of late, with a number of councils using Freestyler CMS as their enterprise content management platform, several councils using our Central Intranet portal and with several new councils on board with our web2.0 application - Youth Portal.  We've had some great success with these projects and look forward to discovering the latest trends in local government techology to apply new solutions for our customers.

This yea'r program is a little different, with some new speakers.

Continue reading LG 3.0 - Collaborative ICT Delivery

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Microsoft and Facebook, a marriage made in heaven ?

Facebook, a social networking site that has grown phenomenally in the past few years, has finally succumbed to the temptation of selling a stake to Microsoft. 

Regular readers will be familiar with my excitement about Facebook as a web social media.  Since I wrote that article, over 8,000 third party applications have been produced for the platform, of which is one of ours.

However I am not so sure that this move is a good one.  There are more than a few Facebook users who have vowed to cancel their accounts when Microsoft takes a stake, amongst fears of excessive commercialisation.  Part of Facebook's appeal to generate communities is despite its promotion of open communication between social networks is its lack of "in your face" commercialisation and respect of privacy.  It will also be interesting to see exactly what Microsoft's business plan is for the site.

$240 million gives them a stake of 1.6 percent.  Not much, but significant all the same.  Still, it is a pawn in their battle against Google, who have benefitted substantially from their acquisitions of other social media sites like Blogger and YouTube.

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