I went to an interesting lecture today for GIS Day at the U of MN given by Dr. Michael Goodchild on “Geographic Information in the World of Web 2.0”. Yes, a GIS lecture! I have a few little degrees in GIS, so I thought it would be fun to go. Goodchild was a good speaker, had some great maps, and showed some fun Google Maps items and other mapping systems on the Internet.
Goodchild also made an interesting comment. He said that it takes about 100 million computers to run Google and store all their information, but what happens 5 or 10 years down the road when there is even more information, data and other info on the Internet. Will they, or anyone else for that matter, be able to store all the information? Good question.
One fun site he showed was http://wikimapia.org/ and how it maps your location. Then you can click on one of the various boxes around your location for interesting info that people have put in (yes you too can enter information on wikimapia!), but most of the time its a link to city hall or someones web or wikipedia web page.
