Well, it doesn’t seem like a whole month has passed since FOSS4G. but it’s nearly halloween so I guess it must have done. Here in Lancaster things have been mighty hectic, with office moves and related changes (I now know a lot more about VOIP phone systems than I ever wanted to). It’s only this last week where I feel like I’m actually back in the saddle and doing real work again.

There have been a number of interesting posts over the last few weeks relating to subjects close to my heart:

1. A great post from Vector One about why we need National Mapping Agencies . Once and for all, I like what Openstreetmap are doing but there are cases when it’s not enough. Having said that, I’m very interested in another blog that has recently started up about mapping Durham, my old university town for openstreetmap.

2. Another great post from Publishing Archaeology, about… umm… Publishing Archaeology, exploring the idea that we (archaeologists) need to publish outside of our rather esoteric discipline if we want to be taken seriously. Most archaeologists will have had conversations with sceptics about whether what we do actually matters, and some of us can even cite reasons why archaeology does matter (go and read Collapse if you need convincing) but until we start pushing our work as sociologically, economically, environmentally important then we’re not going to get very far.

Other developments here in Archaeogeek towers: Mapguide Open Source now works happily on Ubuntu 7.04 and I’m just about to start trying to integrate the OGR provider for connecting to databases, and Portable GIS is being demoed by a select group of guinea pigs so things should move forward with that quite soon…