[Az-Geocaching] Stat problems

[Andrew Ayre]

See www.opencaching.com

However, after a promising start, there wasn't much visible progress so
interest seems to have tailed off. There is a demand from some people (I
would like to see it too) for gc.com to be more open with the data, but IMO
the reality is that most geocachers don't know or don't care about this. I
think that the majority of geocachers don't read the gc.com forums or local
mailing lists like this one and are probably unaware in the first place.
geocaching.com right now is like Microsoft. It reached critical mass a long
time ago and now has a stranglehold. Having said that, I don't have the time
or money to build a rival web site, so I will shut up (instead of put up).
:)

Andy


-----Original Message-----
From: az-geocaching-admin@listserv.azgeocaching.com
[mailto:az-geocaching-admin@listserv.azgeocaching.com]On Behalf Of Art
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 3:57 PM
To: listserv@azgeocaching.com
Subject: Re: [Az-Geocaching] Stat problems


Again, a newbie type perspective, but it appears that they have to much
control over this data.  I was reading their "Terms of Use" and it is
incredibly restrictive.  It takes direct aim at sites such as
azgeocaching.com.  Has the community thought about opening up an open
database full of cache information, instead of submitting it all to a
closed source?  This really seems to be a community driven activity that
is controlled by one entity.  That might work out now, but there is no
guarantee they will put the interests of the community ahead of their own
personal interests.

But like I said, I am still pretty new to all of this, so maybe I just
don't understand the whole situation.

-Art-

> Art wrote:
>> I am new to caching, but a long time perl coder.  Have you asked
>> geocaching.com about the possibility of a nightly XML dump, or a
>> .net/SOAP
>> interface?
>
> Yes.. over and over again..  They either say no, or promise the
> possibility of it in the distant future.
> Until then, we'll have to continue to pull a couple hundred megs of web
> pages off their site to get about 10 meg worth of data.  It would really
> be worth their time and save them some money to just give us a data
> export.
> I think at this point, it's just about control of the data.... They
> could continue to have that with a license agreement, but oh well.
>
> Brian Cluff

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