IBM Honors ESRI with Top Star Award for Being "Best of the Best"

From Press Release:

Redlands, California—IBM, the world leader in information technology, has named ESRI a recipient of its 2007 Public Sector Top Star Award for consistently demonstrating the "Best of the Best" business partner qualities.

ESRI was recognized for forging a successful partnership with IBM, as well as building success in the marketplace, at IBM's PartnerWorld 2007 in St. Louis, Missouri.

"IBM and ESRI are committed to improving the health, education, security, and prosperity of citizens and nations around the world," says Pamela Kaplan, vice president of Marketing, IBM Global Public Sector.

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New Florida GIS Resource - Find GIS: Just a quick note in case you happen to live in Florida. A new web resource for GIS in Florida has been stood up - Find GIS can be found at http://www.findgis.com/. You can read their welcome and information about what the site offers HERE. Till next time.

The ESRI Support Center blog has moved to a new URL. You can now find it here: http://blogs.esri.com/Support/blogs/supportcenter/ Enjoy!

San Diego October 2007 Fires Well, the four year anniversary of the Cedar and Paradise fires was too much of the same. At least as far as the fires go. What was quite different today from four years ago is the response (including the GIS response in some major ways). We were evacuated and came inches from loosing our home, so I wasn't as involved with the GIS response this time as I was in 2003. But that turned out to be OK since people looked at what didn't go so smoothly in 2003, learned from it, and put policies and procedures in place in case something like the Cedar fire ever happened again. No one thought it would be a mere four years later that so much of the county would be on fire. But they were ready, and things went pretty darn smoothly. Not easy - it never is, but night and day when compared with the Cedar fire response. It was a treat to see real maps on the news reports. In 2003 we saw so many county wide simplistic maps showing a big campfire image to represent where the fires were. That told the public next to nothing. Fast forward to 2007 where they were showing highly detailed maps of the latest fire perimeters and evacuation areas. How? The County EOC was staffed 24 hours a day with at least three GIS staff making maps - and a number of these were converted to PDF files and provided to the media and the public. So the news stations were showing PDF maps (exported from ArcMap) and interacting with them on large monitors. Here are a few samples - The Final Evacuation Areas map and the Final Fire Perimeter map.

What's Your Google Rep? (eWeek Careers) Do you share a name with an axe murderer? Worried about those pictures from Spring break '99? Protecting your digital good name isn't as hard as you think. The practice of manipulating, or "gaming" Google results is getting a bad rap this month as dozens of prominent Web sites have watched their Page Ranks plummet and inbound search traffic and advertising-paid page views slip as a result. But not everyone is trying to maneuver Google for personal gain and future earnings, or at least not directly. Some are just job seekers, hoping to push pictures from Mardi Gras 1999 down from the number one position in a list of results when their names are entered into the search engine. Increasingly, having damaging information or a lack of professionalism online is a deal breaker when applying for a job. Eighty three percent of recruiters—up from 75 percent just two years ago—said they used search engines to learn more about job candidates, according to an Aug. 14 survey released by the recruiting firm ExecuNet. Furthermore, the number who had eliminated a candidate based on what they found online jumped from one quarter (25 percent) to nearly one half (43 percent). more...