Advertising Hits Arizona County Government Website 239
Combuchan writes "Just when you thought that pages on your local government's website were the last bastion of the advertisement-free WWW, that may soon change. Maricopa County (seen on slashdot before), home to 3.4 million people in the Phoenix metropolitan area, has seen their GIS website "become an every day tool for realtors, developers, mortgage and title companies, appraisers, inspectors, attorneys and many other professionals associated with the real estate industry." As a result, they are now accepting bids for Web advertisements. As the county is one of the best-run in the nation, this could set quite the precedent."
Adblock for FireFox (Score:2, Informative)
Re:what is the point (Score:3, Informative)
Says it all right there
Re:if they are using ESRI products (Score:2, Informative)
what's better? throw something together with grass and gmt? right
people are willing to pay (i work with gis people that work with that
now
Re:Ha ha hee hee ho that's a good one. (Score:3, Informative)
there's plenty of well water here
Re:Thank God for Adblock (Score:1, Informative)
http://texturizer.net/firefox/adblock.html [texturizer.net]
and follow the directions there.
Re:if they are using ESRI products (Score:2, Informative)
but hey that's just my opinion... if there was an opensource way to take my orgs desktop
but i digress... GIS is very useful, more towns should take advantage of it... and any savings from man hours spent dealing with paper map requests at town hall, is offset by the team of IT professionals trying to keep an ESRI online mapping product up and online =)
e.
You don't know Phoenix... (Score:3, Informative)
The prehistoric Hohokam Indians first settled the area about 300 B.C. and dug a system of extensive irrigation canals for farming. This system included over 300 miles of major canals, which took its water from the Gila, Salt, San Pedro and Santa Cruz rivers. This water was then used to support thousands of acres of farm land. Much of Phoenix still uses the canals dug by the Hohokam.
The Phoenix area has sustained many cultures for many centuries. Phoenix has quite a few "renewable" sources of water and desert land is quite fertile and supports many crops including fruit, lettuce, cotton and hay.
Arizona produces enough cotton a year to provide at least one pair of jeans for everyone in America. Also, it is very likely that the Iceberg lettuce that you enjoy in your salad comes from Arizona. If you enjoy fruit salad, Arizona is one of the top producers of melons in the U.S.
Not to leave out the carnivores, 534.9 million pounds of beef comes from Arizona cattle per year. Getting hungry? Let's finish things of with dessert... if you have some cookies, you need milk... over 350,000 gallons are produced in AZ each year.
While it is true that Phoenix has outpaced its local resources and requires supplementary services to survive, it is far below that of much of Southern California. After all, what major metropolitan city can support itself agriculturally? I think that our neighbors in Las Vegas and Southern California are much worse off.
Just because Phoenix is in a desert, doesn't mean that it isn't naturally livable. Actually, your dire assessment of the area would lead me to conclude that the fact those of us who life there aren't dead yet, is proof enough that someone is doing something right.
Having lived in Georgia, I can say, from experience, that Maricopa County services are so much better than those of DeKalb County. The fact that my driver's license doesn't expire until I am 65 is reason enough to offer props. You have no idea how many hours I've spent waiting GA DOV lines to renew a license. In Maricopa, nearly every government service has an online component and information is only a click away: http://www.maricopa.gov/ [maricopa.gov]
Just my $0.02,
Re:Right (Score:3, Informative)
Incidentally, there's been "advertising" by GIS firms on this state's GIS website for at least three years, as well as a directory of where to get your GIS imported. Most of these firms are NOT corporations at all...they're private firms and small businesses and sometimes just clever geographers with plotters and spare time. There's no reason government and business shouldn't work hand in hand, so long as it doesn't squelch peoples' rights, and in this case we're getting a lot more out of the deal than we're putting in to it.
Re:if they are using ESRI products (Score:3, Informative)
As soon as something can approach the functionality and usability of ArcInfo, I will gladly agree with you. But as it stands, ESRI's stuff isn't overpriced so much as everything else is under-engineered (and it shows!)
I don't feel bad giving my money or my clients' money to ESRI...because I know that they'll quickly eat up the $500-$1000 they save buying MapInfo stuff in wasted time due to silly interfaces and buggy code. MapInfo's data management and mapping tools are excellent...their data display and map generation tools, sorely lacking.
That said...for the absolute lowest level GIS stuff (splicing together seams of an orthoimage or converting mercater projection coordinates to longitude latitude), the ESRI package is major overkill. Few of our customers will never use the really impressive features of the toolset. But it also saves them time having ME install and layer their datasets...which I can do in a quarter of the time...and my time is billed at something obscene like $150 per hour.