Cool animals I have seen overt he past few years...

So this is a map of some of the cool animals I've seen that I have pictures of online (my photobucket account). They are mapped geographically according to where they were photographed. They are all wild animals except for the pandas. Yes, you read that right. PANDAS!!! The lines show the approximate distance I have traveled to each destination. The total distance being 20,131.81 miles.

Anyway, enjoy my neogeography...(you might have to zoom out to place the map in frame, I couldn't fix that. Also, It's best to click "view in a larger map" since the photos I used are quite large.)


View James' sweet map in a larger map

Neogeography is a relatively new form of GIS that allows individuals to create open source GIS and spatial data through a common programming interface. Often, this is done through the internet, allowing instant sharing and modification. This ability has allowed GIS to grow exponentially in the past few years, as anyone can create a GIS map. Neogeography is thus, user-centric, as the creator and users are the main focus of the maps, highlighted by the interactive formatting. This interactive format engages casual users and allows maps to be created about almost anything. These maps are highly accessible and create new expectations for dynamic, user-friendly, powerful maps.

unfortunately, this technology has many negative consequences. The largest of which is the quality of these aforementioned maps. user generated maps are not held to any standard and data can easily be inaccurate or completely falsified. The ease of neogeography on sites like googlemaps also creates an excess of maps that may not be that informative or may contain information that people do not care about. This flood of irrelevant data makes people more wary about the validity of other maps (a result of becoming overloaded and jaded with poor content). This map abuse is unregulated due tot he power of the internet. In this way, traditional GIS is useful, as it is professionally made, standardized, and map centric.

In my experience, googlemaps has created a very user-friendly experience that let me publish a map of cool animals I've seen all over the world. It was actually something I didn't know I could do, but was glad that this class forced me to do it. It is something I would love to share with my family and friends. However, the map does not really have any value past showing off to my friends about cool stuff I've done. In this sense I feel many of these user-generated maps are probably made to stroke the egos of the creator. The "look at me!" factor on these maps is probably through the roof. That being said, for every 100 of these worthless maps (mine included) there is a unique and throught provoking map that everyone can enjoy and learn from. In this sense, it is worthwhile to keep this internet infrastructure, as I am willing to put up with all the boring, worthless maps if it means cool maps like Twittervision can exist.