An update of the GIS Website Ratings for September 2000 is (finally) available on the RPM Information Network at http://rpmconsulting.com. This September marks the two year anniversary of these ratings, and an historical archive is also available. As a reminder, these metrics are based on server and network diagnostics, and upon the form, structure and design of served pages, and not on the habits of a panel. These two years have seen some remarkable changes in the virtual GIS landscape. The Web has made maps so ubiquitous that they are now advertised in the US on Monday Night Football. Indeed, the shift towards maps for a mass audience and away from peer-to-peer tech talk mirrors the chasm crossing for the entire Web. Many of us expected GIS and mapping applications to hit the mainstream around the year 2000 -- but few anticipated that Mapquest would be the "killer app", though many anticipated a Microsoft entry to help things along. A brief review of the September 1998 ratings shows that 3 of the major GIS vendors were among the Top 5,000 visited sites on the Web at that time. Today, none are -- with only ESRI among the Top 10,000, and only Bentley (site recently redesigned and very pretty) and MapInfo (site still relatively slow) improving visitation from the measures of two years ago. Except for the top vendor sites, all of the top sites for September 2000 prominently serve maps. Even traffic at the venerable Xerox PARC site has picked up. Also notable is the growing prominence of the National Geographic Map Machine. Among the data portals, the big news is perhaps the nascent Geography Network, with its promise of tying users (and their digital resources) together across the globe. But it is the GIS Data Depot where visits are currently most prominent -- a well-organized site robust with basic content. It certainly would be wonderful if someone at the U.S. BLM would pick up where the late Sol Katz left off -- if that is even possible. Traffic to Sol's site continues, but it has not been revised in a long time and is, sadly, starting to feel like a ghost town. In 2000, we added a suite of format tests to help webmasters improve their document, table and form structure and image syntax. This makes pages load more correctly and faster. Virtually every site rated continues to contain some type of error, and some remain particularly sloppy. Most often the culprit is image syntax, usually the failure to place WIDTH, HEIGHT and ALT tags. When WIDTH and HEIGHT are not set, pages take longer to load because it takes time for the browser to recognize page layout. The ALT tag is important so that users who don't see the images can still know what they are. This effects not only users with older and non-graphical browsers and those with images turned off, but particularly those who are visually impaired or who are accessing the web by phone with a screen reader. Two commercial sites (Claritas and MicroImages/TNT) and two non-commercial ones (Odden's Bookmarks and AI-Geostats, both redesigned) are coded perfectly. Finally, this month's visitors to the RPM Infonet at http://rpmconsulting.com will find some powerful new tools for banking research and planning in the new dataBank portion of the site. Public health practitioners will find an update on RPM's activities in Mozambique and an archive of Chuck Croner's fine Public Health GIS newsletters, including the current issue. Coming this Fall is Powerstation, a dedicated site for business geographics. As always, we look forward to your visits, comments and contributions. ************************************* Steve Lackow RPM Consulting 17130 Devonshire St Northridge CA 91325 818-831-7607 http://rpmconsulting.com ************************************* "Alice had not the slightest idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but she thought they were nice grand words to say." -- Lewis Carroll ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put "unsubscribe MAPINFO-L" in the message body, or contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
