If I had my choice in the matter, I would just sit around and read blogs about geotechnology all day.  It’s one of my very favorite topics.  I don’t get to do that, but I do track the sector for coverage of unusually interesting news to cover on the general interest site I co-edit, ReadWriteWeb.

To that end, using a somewhat complex process I came up with some time ago, and with the help of former RWW research intern and geo-nerd Justin Houk, we put together the following collection of nearly 300 blogs covering geotechnology.  Then we ran these puppies through Postrank to track the most-talked-about posts from across the geotechnology blogosphere.  We track those, along with the most-talked-about posts from across a number of other niche topics, to find cool news for nerds.

One of the features that Postrank offers is ranking the blogs in any collection by the amount of reader and social media engagement their posts receive. (Comments, inbound links, Tweets, delicious saves, etc.)  That sounds like fun, doesn’t it?  I thought it could be a cool way to help discover up and coming blogs that readers might not know about and more.  I also liked the way that Postrank showed how rankings changed week over week.

So I thought I’d blog about it!  Forgive me if this seems presumptuous (I can’t claim to be an expert in this field) – but it’s the robots doing the ranking!  What I ask of you, site visitor is this:  who am I missing?  Speak up, now or whenever, and I’ll add your georelated blog to the index.

I plan to make a weekly posting on ReadWriteWeb about the top geo blogs, the top movers (up and down, with a caveat or two) and probably some selected articles that were big hits.  I’m planning on doing the same thing with the top several hundred blogs in other topics we love at ReadWriteWeb: Internet of Things, Big and Structured Data, maybe education technology, we’ll see.

I’ve been wanting to figure out a good way to do this for awhile, but tonight I learned how to pull data from Postrank using Needlebase (which I love). Want to see quickly if your blog is included in the following list of 300? Control-F should help you search this page for your blog’s name. Let me know in comments if it needs to be added.

For now, let’s start with geotech. This is a fun list, but let me know who ought to be on it and isn’t.

Kevin Pomfret, Executive Director of the Centre for Spatial Law and Policy, wrote a very good overview post last week about privacy law concerns with regard to location technology.  The overview is written from a clearly pro-technology perspective, but in a legalistic tone.  Pomfret cautions lawmakers not to create overly broad privacy laws covering location technology, at the cost of innovation.  Check it out:

Location data is just now being used to provide a growing number of critical governmental, societal and business services. The number and value of these services are increasing daily. Attempting to regulate the collection of location data without a full understanding of the technology and its vast potential could have a number of unintended consequences, including limiting the development of a number of critical governmental services. Such opportunity costs should be fully understood and explored before regulating location from a privacy standpoint. In addition, any such legislation should be narrowly tailored so as not to inhibit further growth of this important technology.

via Spatial Law and Policy: Location Privacy – Why It Is Different!.

I think the whole post is quite well articulated, and I agree with the sentiment.  What do you think?

So I’m editing OpenStreetMap tonight (for the first time) and I find a place a few miles from my house called the Vanport Wetlands. The map says there’s a radio tower there, that it belongs to the radio station KGW AM and that it was built in May of 1984. Very cool. Makes me wish I had an OpenStreetMap augmented reality app on my phone, or some way to easily see information about all the Points of Interest on OpenStreetMap within a given area around where I am.

But then I highlight the letters KGW AM in my browser and my browser plug-in from Apture pops up. Ok, first I searched the wetlands with Apture and learned about its history, saw some photos – awesome augmentation of OpenStreetMap. But then I searched KGW AM and I found a link to a website about the history of Portland’s radio stations. One of the entries was about the Vanport radio tower being decommissioned for wetlands restoration in the year 2000! The history page says that the local Port Authority built a multi-media website about the tower’s history as penance. But the website is no longer up- there’s a domain squatter on it now.

Enter Archive.org! I loaded the tower memorial site in Archive.org, read all about it, then went back and edited the OpenStreetMap entry for the tower in the wetlands to include a note saying it was decommissioned and the link to the memorial site via archive.org! Now future users of OpenStreetMap will be able to see that new historical note. Thanks internet!

How awesome is that?? I think it’s crazy awesome. So many different trends intersect in that experience: community edited content, location, contextual search ala Apture, blogging or at least easy publishing ala the local radio history site and do not forget content archiving thanks to the fabulous Archive.org!

The end result? Meaningful enrichment of my relationship with the place I live, and an opportunity for me to further enrich the relationships others have with this place.

I sure do love the internet. I’m sure those old radio shows broadcast through that tower were cool too – but media is changing radically, is it not?

I keep making blog posts and podcasts about the emerging world of sensor data (the Internet of Things) and alluding to the need to figure out privacy policies and considerations. I will allude no more! It’s time to start thinking explicitly about this stuff and drawing out the boundaries of our collective conversation about it. Before it’s too late!

This is an incredible opportunity but one that certainly carries some risk as well. Let’s see if we can leverage the tidal wave of data coming while protecting our personal privacy as well!

In case you’re not familiar with this concept, here’s a great primer video from IBM, one of the primary vendors in the Internet of Things market. Following that, you’ll find a podcast I recorded a few minutes ago while waiting for a bus home. Below that you’ll see the beginnings of a mind map on the topic. I’m doing some interviews and thinking this through for what I hope will be an important post on ReadWriteWeb soon. Your thoughts are more than welcome – they are humbly requested.

Intro to Internet of Things

My Thoughts So Far

Direct download

Randy Robertson left me a Cinch comment (on Cinch) suggesting that the medical industry could be a good model to learn from regarding patient data privacy. Sounds good.

In Mindmap Form

I’m looking over about 100 applications for an evening news writing gig over at ReadWriteWeb and thought I’d share some thoughts about the process.

If I wanted to be a pro tech blogger, here’s what I’d do. Heck, here’s what I did.

The short version of this story is: blog awesomely like a pro news blogger would, and the opportunities are out there for you to become a pro news blogger.

Not so long ago, I was working at a convenience store, selling candy, soda, beer and lottery tickets. I had just graduated with an undergrad degree in political science and I discovered the world of blogging, RSS, etc. in the last few months I was in school. My plan was to do consulting for nonprofit organizations about how to use these new tools for research and promotion, but I had to pay the bills – thus the convenience store gig. Maybe you have a better job than that now – but I still think this is good advice.

I started a blog and wrote about the things I was learning. Here’s the first post I ever wrote. I broke the post-page template one day and decided to move off Blogger, but here’s my first month’s archives if you’re curious.

I read other tech blogs, posted the smartest comments I could and linked to their posts in my posts. Then I went to an industry event and met some people. Barb Dybwad and Marnie Webb, now at Mashable and Netsquared, were the two people I connected with best at that very first event. We all knew each other from blogs and comments already. (Remind me to tell you the story sometime about that trip to SF. It involves an alarm clock, hitchhiking several rides through a rainstorm, a missed flight and a race to see danah boyd for the first time.)

In blogging I tried to add unique value to conversations and I tried to do a good job at important little projects I started. Both Barb and Marnie ended up hiring me to write for them at Netsquared and at AOL’s Social Software Weblog, within just a few months of our having met face to face. Once I had both those gigs, I quit the day job at the convenience store.

The months between were filled with early morning and late night learning, hard work and hustle. My mother-in-law now says she thought I was crazy, waking up so early in the morning to blog, but she agrees that it worked out pretty well.

Once I got those two jobs, the Social Software Weblog one was where I had the best opportunity for visibility in the larger tech blogging world. The pay there was miserable, it was something like $4 or $5 per post, I don’t remember. I worked that job as hard as I could, though, writing 3 to 5 posts a day. I also had another job writing as a subcontractor for an international currency speculation blog, writing 6 posts about currency speculation every weekday before 9am PST. That was nuts. So I was writing about 10 posts a day, of various lengths and about different topics, at three different places.

I tried to always improve my work while I was doing that. One of the things I learned would give me an important advantage was subscribing to the RSS feeds of key company blogs (Google, YouTube, Technorati back then) by instant messaging and SMS. I used a service called Zaptxt. That way whenever a big company blog would update, I’d get a link sent to me within about 15 minutes. That meant I could write it up before anyone else, as I don’t think many if any competitors were using such a system. (Most everyone among top tech news bloggers does today, I think.)

One day Michael Arrington from TechCrunch called me up and said “you keep beating me to news stories – I want you to come write for me.” It was a very, very small operation at that time. I think I was the first paid writer there. It was awesome and I learned a whole lot. It was a very competitive place.

Now I’m co-editor of the smaller but more tech/less business focused, more thoughtful, sweeter-smelling and more modest blog ReadWriteWeb and I’m looking to hire a killer evening news writer.

Figure out some tricks. Write some blog posts that get attention (in a good way). Leave comments on ReadWriteWeb that make us say “wow, that’s one smart cookie right there.” @ me on Twitter. Be a part of our community.

Break some news. Do some great writing. Show us what you’ve got and make sure we see it out there on the web.

Some people are doing that, to some degree. But the web is making publishing easier by far than it’s ever been in history. Trackbacks, replies and other social media mechanisms make developing connections with people easier than ever.

Tech news blogging is one of the most awesome jobs in the world. It doesn’t pay fabulously when you first start, but seize opportunity by the horns on a very regular basis and there’s plenty of opportunity for advancement. I bought a beautiful house in Portland, Oregon last year. I know that I have been able to do this in large part because I was raised white, male, middle class and heterosexual – I was raised to believe I could make something of myself, that I am at core (original sin notwithstanding, thanks) good and right. Not every one has that privilege.

If you are fortunate enough to be a fast thinker, a good writer, have low cost of living expenses and some free hours each day to strike out into a new adventure – then opportunity is right there waiting for you. Just reach out and grab it. I know you’re out there – lots of you.

It’s painfully challenging to stay active here on marshallk.com, but I post things all day, every day elsewhere! If you know me personally, you can find me on Facebook. And/or find me on Twitter at @marshallk.

Other places I’ve been active lately include Cinch mobile podcasting and on Formspring, where you can ask me any question you like!

And finally of course I am co-editor of ReadWriteWeb.com, in case you didn’t know that!

At last week’s Chirp developers’ conference, Twitter announced plans to release a new feature called Annotations. As I understand it, it will be a way for any Twitter client program to add a metadata payload to each tweet it publishes, with any namespaces it desires. The potential here is poetic, epic, crazy awesome huge. Kim-Mai Cutler’s coverage of it on VentureBeat has been very good, she quotes one unnamed developer as saying it’s “the most disruptive thing Twitter’s done in two years.”

I have been trying to wrap my head around it so I can write about what it means for developers and non-developing end users. This deserves the blogging equivalent of a song, belted out with clear notes and a catchy melody. I’ve got librarians asking me to write about this, on Twitter, and when librarians call – a writer must answer.

I’m reaching out to some of the smartest people I know to get their thoughts about this, and consider yourselves among that group. I would love for you to share any quotable thoughts you have about Annotations in comments here. I will fold your best thoughts into the song I sing while I travel from village to outpost, singing to tell the tale about the epic development Twitter is about to attempt.

OK so really I’ll just blog about it from my bedroom office, but hopefully a lot of people will read it, so please share your thoughts below and make ’em good! Thanks!