In quick summary of what I’ve been up to – as a means of providing a sort of excuse, preview, and immediate alleviating of the overwhelming feeling that “I haven’t posted in a while, so it’s difficult to start again”:

Besides a two week trip to India with Corrie, I gave a plenary lecture at the Library of Congress on Neogeography and digital preservation of geospatial data that will soon be online, spoke at the UK Socio-Cultural workshop on the use of community and citizen generated geospatial data in crisis response and development work. There is also some hopefully soon news on new countries opening up data.

At FortiusOne we’ve been fortunate to work with many great partners this Spring and Summer in providing open collaborative platforms that we’ll soon be able to share with everyone. In addition, we’ve been heads down building out a host of new features to GeoCommons that will really open the GeoWeb and provide more than just visualization. We also participated in the OGC testbed that experimented with the sharing and annotation of authoritative and crowd-sourced data, much of the lessons and capabilities that are already exemplar in GeoCommons, but we’ll be adding more features to enhance the interoperability.

DC continues to be an interesting place to live – and I’ve definitely had more exposure to government than I ever expected. The area is surprising in the innovation and connectedness that is definitely worth sharing.

While we’re about to launch a number of new capabilities, I’m also able to come up for a bit more air. My aim over the next few months is to dramatically increase my posts. Consider this one as a way to poke through the shroud that will enable more regular posting.

In terms of speed, I flew over 50,000 miles, and that doesn’t include the driving, trains, and other modes of transit – China, Kenya, South Africa, UK, and Italy. And home was an interesting concept, as I moved houses 5 times in 2008.

Beyond simple logistics, I was a part of some great events: CIFoo and FooCamp both revolved around similar concepts of the future of humans in technology, I shared my thoughts on neogeography, neocartography and traditional GIS at Where2.0, Stanford, FOSS4G, Future of Web Apps, and applied these concepts in helping with Twitter Vote Report. I captured these trends in an O’Reilly Radar Report that reminded me how hard it is to convey what is in your brain to linear sheets of paper with graphics.

I was also very fortunate to help with mapping of community and growth in New Orleans. The experiences learned from working with people – from Louisiana to Nairobi, food in Mozambique to food in urban gardens – are each amazing and informative in catalyzing the evolving set of capabilities and techniques.

Obviously a big event of 2008 was the company and technology that Mikel and I built, Mapufacture, joining with FortiusOne, which is shaping what 2009 will look like.

And most importantly, I had a great time – and met many new friends. Thank you for a great 2008.

The easiest advice people typically offer is to “mark all as read” and move along. This works sometimes, but as part of both my enjoyment, and profession, it’s necessary for me to track technologies, trends, and various API’s and tools.

I know there are various new services to help me manage my feeds. AideRSS looks particularly good, and the Google Reader trends is getting quite advanced on tracking what articles I actually read, search for, and are updated. But that can still be a wash of information. Especially since “large” news is re-posted numerous times. Currently I often just subscribe to Planets as they are a first step in filtering quality posters – but I miss that fringe and non-industry information as well.

My solution has been to instead grab my first cuppa coffee and sit with my twitter reader. The logic is, I’ve already filtered my twitter list to be primarily only people I in some way value their opinion or thoughts. The people are themselves gathering and selecting information and at some point a bit of knowledge crosses a threshold of “need to share this with the world” and they put up a twitter with a short url. Since the tweets are also limited to 140 characters, I’m not forced to read long posts getting to the point (this post as a case in point).

In general, this has meant I’ve been able to follow along with a mixture of high-importance events (Chinese Earthquakes), as well as mundane ones (general reviews of movies such as Indy and Juno). I’ve also felt less compelled to catch up on my feed reader – it’s more of the historic archive of longer materials that I should peruse through. In fact, I also often do searches inside my feed reader based on some bit of information from twitter, to find any relevant information from my ‘trusted’ sources. A kind of archived customized search engine.

While Twitter isn’t meant to be a news aggregator – and I don’t really want it to be either – it’s been serving the need to easily find out the current state of affairs in the morning and throughout the day. It makes me feel more connected with the broader world and that I’m not missing out on key events.