Point of Beginning Blog

Darron Pustam, MBA, GISP, is a technology consultant with 20 years of experience in diverse areas of information systems management. He is currently consulting with CSX on developing a Strategic Plan that will become the roadmap for sustaining an enterprise GIS at the largest railroad in the eastern United States. Darron manages the Data Czars group on LinkedIn-a group that is “passionate about the efficient capture and routing of data throughout any organization.” He can be reached at dataczar@att.net.

The Data Czar: Social GIS

March 22, 2010
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GIS always seems to meander its way into our lives in one way or another. The latest is its infiltration into the social media realm. With hundreds of millions of users, the marketing potential is phenomenal.



GIS always seems to meander its way into our lives in one way or another. The latest is its infiltration into the social media realm. Popular social sites Facebook and Twitter are promising to extend location as part of their ongoing efforts to keep us virtually connected as a species.

Users of these platforms typically want to share almost anything about themselves, privacy concerns or not. There is little doubt we shall see the location tab underused. Of course this model is already in existence by Brightkite, Foursquare, Booyah and Gowalla, and others are comfortably establishing themselves in location-based technology as part of their social product offerings.

With hundreds of millions of users, the marketing potential is phenomenal. By enabling the capabilities of geographic information with the consumer in this milieu, the spatial potency of social GIS emerges to target consumers based on their location.

Spatial data requires painstaking management-an intense melody of behind-the-scenes efforts supplemented by stringent policies that culminate into the functional maps, displays and apps we use today. GIS has woven itself against a backdrop of technological gadgetry and, thanks to the user interactions premise of Web 2.0, will give more vigor to social networking and add new dimensions to the discipline.


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What do you think? Will location-based social networking assist the surveying and mapping professions? Please share your comments below.
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GIS and social media

Stephen Harvey
March 24, 2010
I think that location based social networking is going to be the next big Web 2.0 happening. As far as helping surveying and mapping, not sure. Mapping providers will be needed to integrate visual renderings of where people are into the social media realm. The geo-location ability of social media will be a huge benefit to marketers, so that will apply to marketers that target surveying and mapping industries. I am was involved with land surveying for many years as a Technology Director and have now transitioned to the world of social media. I enjoy seeing the two fields inter-mingle.

Land Surveyors United

Justin
March 31, 2010
there's a lot of talk about this over on http://landsurveyorsunited.com and quite of bit of implementation as well. Its a great place to engage with other professional land surveyors using all of the tools above in one place.

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