In fact, when it comes to news items, I pretty consciously look around the GeoBlogs first to make sure I'm not stepping on someone else's story. I get the sense that a lot of the other bloggers do that, too bcause I rarely see repeats of things with one notable exception. Now to be fair, the SlashGeo folks are actually trying their hardest to start up a conversation, but they are fighting a never-ending uphill battle. Interest does not seem particularly high, and there's the occasional downright critical piece about them.

Going into a tangent about the slashdot model being old and tired, I think I only partially agree. I think the SlashGeo people are victims of what some of the other commenters had to say - namely most GIS people don't know much about (or care) blogs. How can you start a conversation with odds like that?

Adena deservedly mentions GIS Monitor and humbly does not mention All Points Blog. I was one of her biggest fans at GIS Monitor and was quite sad to see her go. All Points has a different format and I'm not sure it's letting her regain her previous ability to really galvanize conversations. I must say that I have All Points as the first item on my Geo bookmarks. But there are not that many comments on each article, which is too bad (and says more about the topics than anything else, they are generally also news blurbs and not analysis or commentary).

Let's not forget some previous conversations. There have been some doozies, comp.infosystems.gis, GISList (look for GISList: OGC & standards, GIS, etc. which begins on 12/10/2002 and runs into January 2003) and more recently the blogs have had their share, just to pick a few. These tend to be more sporadic, and fewer and further between than, say, the battles about politics tend to be.

So what sparks these? I think there is no actual shortage of events or topics. Sometimes it just takes someone with a different twist on a topic to get things going.

While I was waiting for a software update to complete, I made a list of sure-fire conversation starters. Feel free to use them!

• OGC (cost of attending, quality of the output, overall impact on the industry, personalities)
• OSGEO (why does it exist?, will it be a positive force?, will it turn into a bureacracy?, will it turn into OGC?)
• SDI (why is it so hard to build SDI's?, who needs an SDI when we have Google/Google Earth?, why are National Mapping Agencies so slow to move ahead?)
• Geospatial One Stop (what's that?, does anyone actually use it to search for anything?)
• Google Earth (is it going to be EveryGIS? Is it going to be EverySDI? is KML better than GML?)
• GML (who is using it? does anyone use GML 3.x? Do people know about Simple GML? Is KML better than GML?)
• Free Data (when will everyone realize that taxpayer funded data should be made available to the taxpayers?)
• INSPIRE
• Google Earth vs. the Governments of the World (imagery? of my sensitive places?)
• The Next Big Thing / The Next Killer App
• Why is mapping, GIS, etc. all so hard?
• What's so hard about mapping, GIS, etc?
• Are mashups pablum or real?
• How does MapQuest serve more maps than anyone else if I never use them anymore?

Go ahead, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. The trouble is, it all takes time!