The season of Christmas, Snow, Holidays, New Year, eating too much and getting caught up in the inevitable Christmas travel chaos is fast approaching but before we hang up our stockings for Santa to geotag, what sort of a geo-year was 2009?
In January we decided that people seemed to be having far too much fun on Twitter and we launched @yahoogeo on an unsuspecting world. GeoPlanet, launched at Where 2.0 in Burlingame in 2008 went from strength to strength and we helped host one of the London #geomob meetups.
In February we set out the “non golden rules of Geo“, which state
- Any attempt to codify a series of geo rules into a formal, one size fits all, taxonomy will fail due to Rule 2.
- Geo is bizarre, odd, eclectic and utterly human.
- People will in the main agree with Rule 1 with the exception of the rules governing their own region, area or country, which they will think are perfectly logical.
- People will, in the main, think that postal, administrative and colloquial hiearachies are one and the same thing and will overlap.
- Taking Rule 4 into account, they will then attempt to codify a one size fits all geo taxonomy.
- There is no Rule 6, see Rule 1.
Then in May we built upon the success of GeoPlanet and launched Placemaker and GeoPlanet Data at Where 2.0 in San Jose. A lot of people liked this.
In June we took our Open Location concept on the road and we turned up at a few conferences and talked for as long as we could get away with it on matters geo including WOEIDS, GeoPlanet, Fire Eagle and Placemaker. From London, to San Jose, by way of Palo Alto, Amsterdam, Southampton, Stratford-upon-Avon, Munich and Harrogate the geo message reached an amazing set of audiences in Where 2.0, WhereCamp, State of the Map, GeoCommunity, #geomob, Telematics, mashup* and the Association for Geographic Information, to name but a few. This took up almost the remainder of the year.
And finally in October, after a brief holiday, we brought GeoPlanet Data back online. A lot of people liked this.
So to 2010; what’s coming up next year. We’ve got some new products bubbling away which we hope you’ll like; all WOEID enabled of course. We’ll continue to be at some conferences and will be at Location Based Services Evolution 2010 in Berlin, Embedded Mobility 2010 in London, Where 2.0 in San Jose, Telematics in Detroit and State of the Map in Girona.
Have a geotastic Holiday season and a geotagged New Year.
Gary Gale, Director of Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies
