Just finished a long and detailed blog post about the conference. Take a look: http://metromapper.blogspot.com/2008/06/your-mapper-netsquared-conference.html

Again, here I am marveling at the innovation of these various projects and the many lofty goals they hope to achieve.

The one thing that comes to mind is that the attendees are slowly becoming bogged down with so much data, that the projects with the streamlined messaging will be the ones to win the big prize money.

We will find out the voting results this afternoon. But first, three more projects launch into discussions about their impact, goals, and why they're worthy of the prize money.

Your Mapper

Your Mapper allows anyone to map anything. That's the project in a nutshell.

In the spirit of openness, and like the MapLight blog entry last week, I wanted to share my 2 minute speech with the other projects so they can get some ideas and possibly provide some feed back. So here is a video of me speaking about the Your Mapper project:

YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtMxtwLSv1o

Hey, I've got a [>] Play button on my nose! 

Here's the interview I conducted with Michael Schnuerle, head of the Your Mapper project.

Twitter is a great tool for a number of niche tasks. But it only works and makes sense once you have a certain critical mass of followers and friends.

It's good for getting informative updates from people you know and respect.  It's good for asking for quick help or information from your Twitterers.  It's even good for asking for support and online voting help.  So I've got a way for some people to make use of it and learn its ins and outs.

But it's really great for telling people where you are for last-minute meetups and open invitations.  Which makes it useful in a conference setting.

Your Mapper has a Project Lead now and his name is Ted Ko. Ted was matched up with Your Mapper through the efforts of the NetSquared team and Billy, and brings some great small business experience and project planning skills to Your Mapper.

Here's an overview of some of Ted's background:

I'd like to announce a new member of the Your Mapper team, Ben Peskoe, who will be our Development Manager. Ben will be attending the NetSquared conference so everyone will get to meet him there.

Ben has a stong background in web programming and development and brings some small buisiness and interface design experience to the project. He currently runs Sierra Interactive, a turnkey web solution for realtors, located at sierrainteractive.com.

I'd like to announce a new website that I'm starting up called The Open Municipal Geodata Standard Organization Website, or OMG Standard for short, at www.omgstandard.com. The idea behind it is to have an open forum to discuss and collaborate on how to involve governments to effectively release their public data to communities.

The goals at the moment are to:
1 create an open standard for the structuring of municipal data
2 convince governments it's in their best interest to make the data easily available
3 provide tools to let this happen efficiently

I've just awarded the prize to EastSideDesigns.biz for his submission of logo #158 . Congrats! Thanks to everyone who talked with me or sent me messages about the designs they liked. It was really helpful to get some community feedback for this.

A Crowdsource Design Site for a Crowdsource Mapping Site Logo

For the Your Mapper project, we decided to use an existing site to "crowdsource" the design of our logo. This means that we are starting up a paid contest to determine our logo. Anyone can contribute a design for free, everyone can vote for and comment on the designs, and to the winner goes $150 in cash!