The geotagged Geoblogosphere

I have added metacarta's geoparser API to Geoblogosphere News which is able to recognize placenames in blog posts. The recognized places are visualized now in two ways:

First: a little Google chart API map shows a quick overview, the image here shows the first try. (The Geoblogosphere seems to be quite US centric;)) I have placed this beneath the tag cloud..
Second: a click on this map brings you to a Google maps where all geotagged blog posts are shown.

Looks quite nice.. however, sometimes results are quite strange, e.g. the geoparser insists placing blog posts containing 'Darwin' in Australia!

A tag cloud for Geoblogosphere News

Geoblogosphere News, has two new major features:

1. A 'tag cloud' shows a list of the week's most frequent terms you used in your blogs. As this list would have been useless without the possibility to click on a term and get a list of corresponding blog entries I also added
2. some search functionality which allows full-text queries on blog.

This week's hottest geoglobospheric topic seems to be Darwin..

Darwin, darwini, darwinii, darwinianus, darwinianum

Well, here is something to contribute to 'Blogging about Darwin' and has at something to do with Snet: A TaxonConcept query for 'darwin' discovers 12 taxon names containing the term darwin in the second epithet.

It seems as if these taxa have been introduced to honor Charles Darwin. As you can see in the result list, there are a variety of possibilities to latinise Darwin's name there is darwini, darwinii, darwinianus and darwinianum.

I found it also rather astonishing that some of the names have been assigned by d'Orbigny to honor Darwin as early as in the 40th of the 19th century! But obviously Darwin and d'Orbigny knew each other quite well frequently exchanged letters.

P.S.
The TaxonConcept results list is by far not a complete list, for more results you can check also other databases such as ubio, which shows >300 matches for 'darwinii'. Here you will also find some names containing darwiniana..

GPeerReview: Rumours about a new Google peer review tool

Some blogs, e.g. DigitalKoans or NeuroDojo have reported about a new "Google" peer review tool called GPeerreview. Despite the leading G in it's name it certainly is not a member of the Google family but simply is published at and hosted by "Google Code" which led to some confusion.

However, the concept of GPeerreview is very interesting and might influence the future of scientific publishing. GPeerreview is mainly a piece of software, "a command-line tool that makes it simple to write a review of someone's work and digitally".

But the review concept itself significantly differs from the traditional peer review process, as the author of a (electronic) publications would have much more influence on the whole procedure, and it would allow authors to use a peer review process outside the world of scientific journals, e.g on their homepages and -halleluja!- blogs!

This is a short summary of features from their homepage:

With GPeerReview, you can:

• Publish immediately (and get reviews later),
• Seek an unlimited number of reviews,
• Verify the integrity of the reviews,
• Verify the credibility of the reviewers,
• Publish without limitation on format, style, or number of pages,
• Maintain complete copyright ownership of your works, and
• Enhance the acclaim of your already-published works.

Some half-baked geoinformatics project ideas

My new year started quite strange: I had a horrible eye infection which forced me to stay in the hospital for one week and of course kept me away from my laptop for some weeks. The good thing about that was that I had a lot (!) of time to think about new projects.
Here is a list of these half-baked ideas which I wrote down after I recovered:

• Discover how open OneGeology is: OneGeology is based on OGC standards (I assume at least) it would be interesting if OneGeology offers a common access point to OGC services such as WMS or WFS or maybe something like a develloper API to reuse it's data. This is something I'll definetely will check out soon.
• Start a 'Open Geology Maps' project: this could be something which is similar to the Open Street Maps Project but deals with geological maps. There must be thousands of geologigal maps out there which have been drawn by students, scientists and amateurs after field work and now rest in piece somewhere. It would be interesting to offer a website where these maps can be uploaded and integrated e.g. within Google Maps.
• Work on a Geoblog tagging system: This system probably is going to be reality sometimes... the idea has meanwhile been discussed on Chris Rowan's blog and was mentioned before on Michael Welland blog.
• Make use of GBIFs Collection ID and Metadata as LSID replacement: Unfortunately my notes on this are completely confusing and I really cannot remember what the idea basically was about. Was it really antibiotics only you gave me doctors?;)