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This is a secret tip for all Zipflbob enthusiasts out there. The winter season is ending. Most ski resorts have already closed, or are about to close. Why? Probably because the snow is melting, it has been a long season and everybody needs a break, or because people are now getting onto their mountain bikes instead of their skis and snowboards. Now here comes the hint: While the meadows are already green in the valleys and up to about 1200m, there is still compressed snow on the runs, which lasts a little bit longer. As long as you stay away from the grassy bits and try to not destroy the recovering ground, you can still enjoy Zipflbob rides for a little longer. And the best of all - you are almost by yourself as hardly anyone is keen enough to walk up instead of taking the gondola when it is not running.

So before Zipflbob and Zipfljo go hibernating in the basement over summer, they wanted to head for the slopes once again. So here we go. Zipflbob takes the big backpack with all the good food, drinks and the warm and waterproof cloths for the downhill ride. Waterproof turned out to be a bit of a joke, but more about that later…

Since it snowed just a few days ago, walking up was tough. But you really turn into explorer mode when you set your feet in fresh snow and go where nobody has gone before (well, not since the last snowfall at least).

Once you get up, you enjoy the view - green valley, snow covered mountains. You drink some tea, chop some food and then you get dressed up and ready for Zipflbobbing. Here come the tactics: Figure out who has less weight. Let that person go first. Why? Because it will be much easier for a light person to go through 10-20cm of “fresh” wet snow than it is for a heavier person. That way, the first Zipflbobber already leaves a nice track that the second one can follow at an incredible speed.

Next tip: You do not want to go down where it is too flat. It does not need to be super-steep (beware of avalanches and do not take any risks!!!) , but you don’t want it to be flat when the snow is deep and wet. The one, who is leading has to navigate. Tough job. Tip for the one following. Be prepared to break when the Zipflbobber in the lead needs to break. Or perform a super-crazy stunt to get around them or over them. The latter one is for experts only!

When you increase speed on a steeper slope and you get into more flat terrain, Zipflbob turns into a snow mower. I forgot to mention that you should really really wear some proper goggles. Dramatically increases fun, vision and face temperature.

Now if you follow these instructions and you watch out that you can break at any time, for instance if deer crosses the slopes or you get to some red lights, you should be alright - Park Zipflbob and Zipfljo at the end of your run and let them dry. I cannot over-emphasise drying. I have yet to find waterproof clothing which actually stays waterproof. Believe it or not. I had the equivalent amount of snow of 2 snow balls in the inner pocket of my jacket. Don’t ask me how it got there!

May have been the last Zipflbob trip this season. I need to work out how to make Zipflbobs work in summer. I’ve got the wheels figured out, but the brakes are still a bit of a problem. I am pretty sure you need them, but I have no idea how that would work. So all you engineers out there who think you’ve got the idea to make this work, get in touch!

Finding a flat for rent or the right house to buy is actually quite a challenge. Just think about what would be important to you. Close to public transport, walking distance to the bakery (very important!), a supermarket not too far away. How about something green when you look out of the window? Or some mountains, a park, a lake or even the coastline close by. Would be nice, when you want to go for runs, wouldn’t it? Or do you prefer the city centre? Being close to where stuff is happening? I guess you also want to live in a certain kind of neighbourhood, where you feel safe and happy. Not far away from work. You don’t want it to be noisy. If you have kids, how about a child-friendly environment and a kindergarten in the vicinity? Now the favourite place will probably differ, depending on your individual needs, likes and constraints. So how do you go about finding that favourite place? A real estate agent? The newspaper? A map? A walk around? Maybe you’ll combine different strategies to come to a conclusion.

With the new digital earth applications, it has become a whole lot easier to explore and discover places virtually. Plain maps, aerial photographs, birds eye imagery, socio-demographic overlays, Points of Interest such as the bakery, the bus stops, the train station - just select what you want to have displayed in context with other bits of information. However, finding that favourite place is still far from being really straightforward and convenient.

Now take birds-eye imagery and current 3D-City models a little bit further and combine them with the sophisticated databases that already exist and enable you to filter a 3-bedroom place built in the last 5 years within your budget and in a certain area. Imagine, how you walk around in a virtual 3D-landscape, being able to view everything from many different perspectives. Some computer games these days will give you a good idea what will be possible for the “real” mirror earth. With your preferences defined, you start walking around the virtual town. You see the free apartments highlighted in some way and the houses that are yet to be sold. Of course, you can walk inside and have a 360 look around.

Has this potential to disrupt the real estate industry? Introducing Google Earth Real Estate or Microsoft Virtual Earth Flat Finder. Of course by then, anyone will have a digital camera that will output stitched panoramas straight away, ready to be uploaded into digital earth from the mobile device. It will be as easy as just taking a photograph and sending it to someone. Next to no effort required.

I guess efforts are under way to make all this happen, and there will be people claiming that we can already do this. However, I still think the real estate agents will have some more time to prepare… Can’t yet find that place that I am looking for!

Some people at www.koordinates.com have been working very hard! Congratulations for launching the site. I know you guys have been working bloody hard on this but I think the time to come will pay off for all the sweat! It will be more exciting than anything you could possibly imagine! Great motivation for myself to finally get some shit done as well

Glad to welcome Aaron, a friend who came for a short visit from Aotearoa.

Two years ago, I did some experiments with Christian and Rob, another Kiwi who came over from New Zealand for a visit. Back then, we thought that proper winter pants were fully overrated. We also thought that a rubbish bag is good enough for getting down a mountain. I guess this is still true, but if you do have a Zipflbob, why would you want to torture yourself? Kudos to Rob though - true explorer spirit riding a rubbish bag down a world cup run in shorts!

Anyway - today, two years down the track, we have learnt our lessons and wanted to pass on our experience. We got Aaron dressed up and introduced him to Zipflbob. They immediately made friends with each other and Zipflbob promised he’d give everything on the descent.

But first, it was time do some climbing. Inspired by the Kiwi experience, Zipflbob made his way through the fresh and deep snow.

This is when you feel like a true explorer.

Zipflbob on untrodden ground.

You have to admit, Aaron does look a bit like Jack Nicholson preparing for a Zipflbob ride.

Lift your feet and lean backwards to increase speed. Press you feet into the snow and pull the Zipflbob back to break and get your face covered in snow.

I reckon there is some business case potential in developing little solar powered goggle wipers.

The Google Lat Long Blog posted some exciting news today. People can now edit locations on Google Maps and, for example, adjust the position of a marker on the map to provide more accurate positioning information. Some of the interesting questions that arise in context with this new feature concern Google’s backend geocoding database. Google need reference geo-datasets to do their geocoding. Let’s assume that almost all of the marker positions are at least slightly off - let’s assume that heaps of people will love to help out and correct these marker positions. When Google serves geocoding requests, they will use the updated information to provide more accurate results for the user. Some of the businesses that sell geocoding reference datasets charge customers by the amount of geocoding requests to the reference database. Does Google have to count when someone searches for an address that has been manually corrected? Does this need to be logged as a normal geocoding request? Will this “enhanced” and crowdsourced geocoding reference information flow back to the original data providers? Who owns the coordinates? Besides the issue of reliability, isn’t that a great new dataset that will emerge? Or am I missing that the providers of geocoding reference databases still have street name information and the like, which kind of “belongs” to them and is still needed for geocoding? Any chances of Google freeing themselves more and more from huge geocoding bills?

More details about the new feature can also be found in a post on the Understanding Google Maps and Yahoo Local Search Blog

Today, I came across an article called Free Entrance, Free Coffee, Free WiFi…Free Rooms, which was posted on the Tracking Tourism Blog. Stephen, the author, picked up on Chris Anderson’s article Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, which was posted on Wired about two weeks ago. Steven offers some thoughts on how the idea of Free may apply to the travel and hospitality market, for instance, in the case of accommodation providers, who may decide to offer you a bed for free. Something along the lines of “Stay for free, but please spend enough money on food, drinks and activities that in the end, it will pay off for me” may best describe the guts of tourism service providers’ prayers then.

As I continued reading, I thought that the whole travel and hospitality industry is already making great use of the idea of “free”. How about Google Earth, Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps… I could go on and on. I work in the geospatial industry and I can assure you that the costs of geodata offered on these virtual globes and mapping sites are very high. I guess most people using these earth viewer applications may not even think about this, when they zoom and pan around to view the beach resorts around the world in sub-meter resolution, with all the roads and nearby points of interest, which are also just a click away. It’s all for free - doesn’t cost a penny - just enjoy! Sponsored by some companies with big wallets and business models that somehow make it possible to fund the construction of the digital tourism earth. For the geospatial industry, which lived a cosy niche life for a long time, it was an earthquake welcome to the world of disruption. Disruption for free!

The companies, which pay the bills for geodata, the technology to make it available to a world-wide audience in a user-friendly way, and the staff to actually make it happen…. - these companies provide people with the tools to put stuff on the map and to tell map stories. The tourism industry was among the first to embrace this offering and began to put hotels, tourism activities, photographs of tourism places and many other tourism related content on the map - for free. No payment required for geodata. No payment required for technology. Anyone who could do it by himself or herself even got the mash-up for free. Great, isn’t it? Especially for the Long Tail of tourism - places, which were off the map until just a few years ago - the white spots on the tourism maps you may call them - are now filled with a wealth of geo-content. Want to know what the most remote places on earth look like? Go and see on Flickr, Locr or Panoramio. No big deal - for free! Want a route description to prepare and print out, to help you find your way around? Easy and free! Travel tips, recommendations, travel podcasts, travel videos… all free. How many tourism websites did you come across recently, which had a map embedded in one way or another.

So how can these companies afford to pay for all this free stuff? Have you noticed the almost hidden advertising links that you get when you search for a place to stay or even just a website, which will help you find a place to stay. What a fantastic money loop!

I am sure that the travel and hospitality industry will find many more ways to pick up on free. Free-based business models are somewhere out there - waiting to be found, to be talked about, to be realised - and I’m sure not all of them will depend on advertising. Leaves me curious to hear where they are, how they work, if they are digital and if they are real yet!

After we already had spring temperatures up to 19 degrees C last weekend, winter thought this really is pathetic and decided to come back for some extra time. It was snowing pretty hard for about 2 days - then we got a bloody cold night with temperatures around -15 degrees C. When I got up the next day and drove to work, the landscape just looked fantastic. All trees were coated with ice crystals, the sun was shining and the sky put on the best blue in stock.

Now there was something really interesting I discovered on that day as well. I had taken a banana to work the day before, but had forgotten it was still in the car. Trust me, the banana was yellow. Not green, not brown - it was yellow. However, during that freezing night, an interesting metamorphosis must have been happening. The banana turned dark brown - or to be honest, it almost turned pitch-black. It looked pretty much like the bananas you get when you wrap them in aluminium foil and chuck them into the fire for a while to enjoy them with vanilla ice cream and honey afterwards.

On the weekend, we took Zipflbob and his girlfriend, Zipfljo, out for some winter hiking. We thought it would be a good day to show them the Zipfbob god monuments. They are really famous, but Zipflbob had never seen them before.

We continued our walk and came past a huge caterpillar, which was parked next to the track.

Zipflbob got very excited and in the 5 seconds when we didn’t pay attention, Zipflbob was already on his way.

Luckily, there were no keys left, so we got him off the drivers seat before he could do anything stupid. A little further on our way, we discovered some snow-capped conglomerate rocks, which are called Nagelfluh. We explained to Zipflbob that these rocks were formed long before he was born. I think he was very impressed when he heard that a nature reserve called “Naturpark Nagelfluh” would be created soon.

After about an hour and a half, we got to the top and Zipflbob took in the view.

He loves the mountains and he was happy to come up here and enjoy the 360 panorama with his girfriend, Zipfljo.

They moved close together and Zipflbob told Zipfljo that he loved her and wanted to be with her for his whole life. He said that he wanted to have many many Zipflbob kids with her and then also take them up here. They kissed and then prepared for the downhill ride home.

The runs were in top condition and since there were few people on the slopes, we allowed Zipflbob and Zipfljo to go full speed. It was heaps of fun and some of the best Zipflbob riding we’ve done this winter. Zipflbob, Zipfljo - YOU ROCK!

If you ever thought about building a hierarchical navigation tree menu for administrative geographic regions, you should really have a look at GeoTree (via GeoNames Blog) Will save you a lot of time. It would be cool if you also had the polygons for each of the nodes in the tree, basically a complete, non-overlapping hierarchical polygon structure that you could use to select all objects that lie within a specific region that you pick from the tree. This would actually be quite a nice case of geographic brushing again. Mouse-over France in the map and highlight France on the navigation tree at the same time - and vice versa. How about a non-administrative tree? A tree which is built up of natural areas? It would probably be a lot harder to draw sharp boundaries, since mountains, and natural habitats have rather fuzzy boundaries. But this gets us into the “where do mountains begin” question and it means we’re drifting off. I guess we wouldn’t mind overlapping natural habitats and just select all objects in boundary regions more than once then.

Quite a while ago, in 1989, Mark Monmonier used the term “geographic brushing” in the context of exploratory geostatistical analysis. When one specific representation of data is highlighted, another representation of the same data also gets highlighted. While Monmonier can be regarded as a pioneer, working with scatterplots and maps to reveal insights, today the geographic brushing and linking method is widely used in the Geoweb-World of Google Maps mashups and virtual earth applications - Try either or both of the websites loc.alize.us and locr - you can bring up a set of thumbnails and a map with markers for each of the images on it. By moving your mouse over any of the thumbnail photographs, the corresponding location marker gets highlighted and you gain a much better understanding of how the images relate to the map and different places on that map. The same idea works for videos, comments, panoramas… Now if I am planning a walk and want to prepare myself by studying the route, I quite like to have a view where I can get the full context. I want photographs to give me a vivid idea about the landscape I can expect, I want to know where the photographs were taken by having the location markers highlighted on the map. Then, I want to see the location of the places on an elevation profile line to give me an idea whether I will be about to climb or descend when I get to the viewpoint. I also want to hear a sound taken at that location and how about some comments that other people left there? I want the full context and I want it all in one place, all in view! - I want geographic brushing to the max!

After the metaphor turned into something real that we can witness growing bigger and bigger every day, a dedicated journal was well overdue. So here it is: The International Journal of Digital Earth. Some good reading by Prof. Michael Frank Goodchild and Timothy W. Foresman.

These two were among the first to deal with the digital earth topic way back, when Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth and the increased public interest in the digital earth idea hadn’t taken off yet. Well worth having a look at some of Goodchild’s previous presentations, in which he covers the subject. For example, have a look at Digital Earth - Recent Technical Progress or What does Google Earth mean for the Social Sciences. A more recent presentation to look at is The Spatial Web - Visions for a Geographically Enabled Future.

You can also read one of Goodchild’s earlier papers on the topic. In Discrete Global Grids for Digital Earth Goodchild already envisions that the digital earth will provide a “one-stop shop for geospatial data“. We aren’t yet shopping for geodata in Google Earth, but who says we won’t be soon…?