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Geo seems to have become the new black. Every old service tries to “pimp” itself by adding two floats (latitude and longitude) and thus becoming “location specific”, “location aware”, “geotagged”, “geocoded” etc. For some it has even become the Deus ex machina, which hopefully saves the play.

Some years ago the introduction of the very very easy use of the different geo APIs out there – yes you all know them Google Maps API, Bing Maps API, Yahoo Maps API etc. – meant that you did not have to use months setting up a server with MapServer, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, before you could even think of adding geo-content. You no longer have to ask for permission (not to speak of purchasing rights) to use orthos, vector data etc. As with many other new technologies this has brought a vast number of people’s ideas and dreams from being just that into becoming actual applications. As the title says – anybody can do geo now – two clicks, copy&paste, and you have a very nice map with some pinpoints, maybe even with some beautiful custom made pinpoints on a beautifully crafted website.

Geo is now for the masses and not only the few geo geeks. As with other examples of free access to information and to creating information, this has spawned many good examples of applications which actually benefit us as citizens, as consumers, and as a news hungry mass. As an example from my parts of the wood, three non geo guys made “Boliga” in 2007 using Google Earth/Maps – which over the years has played a big role in making the Danish real estate market much more transparent. Today geo information still plays a big role in their business concept.

We also started seeing some of the more “interesting” examples of geo applications, though. These darker examples can often bring cartographers a feeling very akin the one I – as a statistician – know from years of reading newspapers and websites; the feeling that something is (if not totally wrong, then) not quite right. It is the feeling of reading about “the average was shown to be X” or the “risk of contracting Y is Z”, when there it is  accompanied by  information about stratification, population size, variance, choice of statistical model etc.

An example of the above, which is hopefully easily understood, is the following question:

When it is easy to use/illustrate pinpoints and hard to use areas, which of the two will then (most often) be used to illustrate the data?

A sad example of the above was big news in UK last week (so big it broke down): police.uk. The site – which has apparently cost more than £300K – “maps” crime in the UK using aggregated pinpoints for illustration. If one new the coordinate for each crime, this could be a useful (any talk of privacy aside) way of illustrating things. Though, it seems, one does not know the exact spot. At least it seems to be a whole streets worth of crime which is then illustrated at the centre point of the street. This is of course an interesting illustration, as it makes it look like every car theft is made right outside the door of dear old Mrs. Stevens (who, from the look of that map, might be turning the blind eye to a serious amount of crime – or?). The longer a street  is, the more inappropriate this representation becomes – potentially you will end up having many kilometers worth of crime at a single point. At his – very nice by the way – blog Steven Feldman has compiled a list of arguments, which is worth reading.

It is very encouraging to see people try out new things, be it geo, blogging, statistics, crowd sourcing information, mashing up other sources etc. If you are a single person, a start up, etc. you are very adaptable and cam easily change tracks, and take in critique and correct your “product” accordingly etc. When the state starts doing projects,  though, one would expect a certain amount of professionalism. This expectation is certainly not lowered if the cost is anything near the amount described.