State of the Art: Blogging on Maps

There are many different professional blogs about cartography and GIS on the internet. However, blogs are a time-consuming task and I have noticed that several of the professional blogs are intentionally being discontinued by the authors. http://ccablog.blogspot.com/ and http://gis-geoblog.blogspot.com/ are two of the first ones i discovered where the author has announced their intention to discontinue the blog. I don't blame them, blogs are a lot of work and, honestly, do not feel that rewarding (at least to me). There are many other more beneficial activities that could be done in the not-insignificant time it takes to create, write, and maintain a blog. Some of the reasons for stopping a blog include job commitments (making money is always nice) and spending more meaningful time with their families.

The discontinued cartography blog (http://ccablog.blogspot.com/ )included a post about mapping daily activities. The author mapped his daily vehicle route to work, noting how frequently he traveled on the roads. He mapped each road with a graduated brightness to note how frequently he traveled on them. Here's an example of the map he created

The best and most professional blogs I have read are the ones sponsored by companies, such as ESRI (http://www.esri.com/blogs/index.html). Since the company literally pays them to write the blog (or post the work they are doing for the company), the content tends to be of higher quality and the posts are more frequent. Here is an ESRI blog focusing on geoprocessing (http://blogs.esri.com/Dev/blogs/geoprocessing/default.aspx), especially relevant to this blog due to the work I conducted on the V&T railroad.

The archaeology blog is a very interesting topic and the author has a passion for the subject, posting rich discussions about his work, such as a 3d model of a mill that no longer exists from 1890. This is the next step of geoprocessing, actually modeling and placing the buildings that once existed on the old maps.

Overall, I think the purpose of blogs for GIS should be interesting topics or work that is currently being conducted by the author. Research can be done by anyone on the internet, but showing your own personal or proffessional work and including your commentary on it is unique, that is why the blogs provided by developers are so popular.