Archives for September 17, 2006

I have to say it makes me pleasantly happy to see that the ever entrenched “datadepot” has finally been replaced on Google’s search crawl when you search for a common term like “free Alaska DRG” – in the olden days a search like this would always turn up the datadepot as the number one hit – actually they would typically yield about the first 3 hits due to the way the site was initially created, using a number of pages all with the same meta tag info that you would have to painfully click through in order to get to your intended destination. Now it seems like other resources which are actually FREE have taken over the top spot… most notable, the LIBRE free DRG map project seems to have secured the number one position for this term for every State… hopefully the data will actually be freely available there in the near future! Also noteworthy (you know i love knocking the datadepot), the depot and their sites appear to have taken a freefall inn the Alexa rankings in the past few months (sweet!) – I’m outta here – PS: a side note.. if you’re interested in getting in on a free parlay bet each week for NFL football check out sportsbook.com – good luck ;0)

We all know that free GIS data is abundant, however, why is it still so hard to find and why is there so much confusion? I’ll tell you one HUGE reason… the bloody links to spatial data repositories are constantly coming and going… dead weblinks with no paper trail or forwarding link are commonplace. I have a number of directories that I’ve created over the years – like this one – (as do many others) but the links are typically out of data after a year. A few examples.. this pointer to a Colorado clearinghouse (page not found), SC department of natural resources (page dead), or how about this fabulous link to the datamil in Delaware which now leads us to a page that simply tells us to go away… nice! It never ceases to amaze me how a fabulous data resource can be easily found one day and then simply removed or moved the next with no forwarding link. This is but one of the huge problems that we are facing but has a simple solution… provide a simple page forwarding link or redirect when you move or replace a website… it’s not rocket science!