Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Adena Schutzberg at Directions Magazine / All Points Blog discusses a phenomenon of blog aggregators and content stealing... It seems this is controversial in some areas, but her take on it, aside from the core copyright infringement issues, is partly "fuggettaboutit", in that that serious folk will go directly to the source anyways...

I have a slightly little different of a take on it... There's plenty of sources for geospatial news, and aggregators capture it all on the fly. For people who might not have an RSS reader, the benefit is that they can go to one of these aggregator sites and quickly skim the headlines for articles of interest, as opposed to going to each site individually. The geospatial industry is a pretty broad spectrum, soup to nuts. Some folks do cover a considerable breadth, whereas some go very deep within a specific area. Additionally, some blogs, like mine, often go outside of "strictly GIS", to present opinion on other topics, such as surveying, GPS and other allied areas.

If an aggregator site is just capturing feeds and presenting them with no pretext, I have no problem with that, as I typically follow it to the source for anything of interest. On the other hand, separate from the automatic feed aggregator sites, it seems like there are a few blog sites out there that I have come across that frequently either just reprint in entirety, or present a link "here's an interesting article about x", without any analysis, reaction, response, commentary or any value added whatsoever. I tend to view blogs as something that should add substance to the fabric of the geospatial community, and not just parrot things on other sites.

As a side note... Adena was teaching assistant for one of my favorite courses back at Penn State- Spatial Analysis I and II, taught by the late Professor Gould- one of the best professors I ever had.