Sacramento Home Journal

John Lockwood
June 1st, 2007
All the Rest
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This being a new blog about maps, yesterday I started to think about what sorts of categories and topics might spin out of that. In other words, what might we end up talking about?

One major category is mashups, since publishing mashups is more than half the reason for this blog’s existence. Related to that are all the things one might want to mash: Schools, Neighborhoods (Subdivisions), Homes for Sale, Sold Homes, Foreclosures, Short Sales, Shopping, Parks, etc., etc. This is basically the list of anything we can grow a local database for.

Getting into the mashups fever may take us frequently well outside Sacramento as we make honorable mention of other sites.

This is also a huge potential learning area where we have the ability to bounce ideas off others and make the site really cool.

There is the user side of the mashup equation, and if we feel like getting extra nerdy, there’s the developer side — where we explore the APIs and tools.

Beyond that there are topics directly related to types of maps. Health and Safety seems to be a huge one as I look over many of the government offerings. Recreation is one that comes up a lot. Real Estate is obviously one that I’m interested in.

Then there are special-purpose or special-resolution maps. Key ideas here are topographical maps, bike maps, walking maps, and the like. Where do you get these? What’s available? On the real estate side you can talk about parcel maps and subdivision maps.

Now then, paper or silicon? There are several traditional navigational topics we might want to explore, such as orienteering and map reading. On the silicon side are all the modern tools and the topics that arise from that: Global Positioning System (GPS), geocaching, and the like. So there’s a “tools and technology” category that’s quite possible.

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