Left my house near Raleigh, NC at 4 AM to fly out to California. I was a bit weary after nearly 11 hours of travel when I arrived at the Where 2.0 registration desk. But, I did manage to show up just in time for lunch! Brady Forrest of O'Reilley, Program Chair for Where 2.0, joined me for lunch and brought me up to date on events thus far. He said the morning tutorials were well attended and seemed to be quite popular (see schedule for Monday). Also, nearly half the people who registered for the conference were in attendance for the first day events. Also, overall attendance looked to be higher than last year. Several announcements are lined up for the week as well from both big and new players in the geospatial community. Looks like lots of good stuff for this year's event!
The afternoon tutorials included another four tutorials. Naturally, I chose to attend the one by Google entitled: "Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines" by Lior Ron and Mano Marks. Their session focused on how to get your geospatial data to be recognized by search engines (or at least Google). Google has already been scanning web sites for links to GeoRSS, KML, or KMZ files as well as the Google Earth Community and other known locations. They gave tips on how to improve the chances things will be indexed. A significant point is that you shouldn't make a single large file with tens of thousands of placemarks. Better to break down the content into different files. The one piece of real news in this session is that Google is now supporting a new sitemap file format for geospatial content. This means you can very specifically tell the search engines to look for a KML, KMZ, or GeoRSS file which will then be almost immediately scanned into the geosearch index. The last half of the session was dedicated to discussing how to create good KML content using various tools as well as directly coding KML. Google said there will be more of these tutorials during the Google I/O developer conference later this month.
Keep reading for some details on Ignite/Launchpad.
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