I ran into an interesting article on the Amazon Web Services Blog on Metropix. The company appears to be trying to help real estate agents market properties with the creation of 2 and 3-D floor plans available properties. (They are using S3 to host their data files).

What struck me was a comment at the end of the blog, which stated “that content is still king on the Net.” In this case, the content is a form of geospatial content, just not a form that we in the professional services industry might think of as geospatial content. The GIS or survey community might overlook this content as being advertising or marketing driven, not the quantitative content that you could determine water flows through a flood plain or predict this season’s forest fire.

However, Metropix’s content is a shining example of what I believe will be an explosion of “geospatial” content. Any digital content that can be tied to a point of the ground that has value to another should be considered geospatial. This wider view dramatically expands our “traditional” concept of geospatial content, and points the way to a larger future for our field.

The question will be how to monetize this digital information. The most frequently used revenue stream in the professional services field is direct consulting services sales (e.g CH2M Hill), but there are many individual companies that are also providing direct internet sales of data to their customers (e.g Digital Globe). I would put Metropix in this category of revenue. There is of course the advertising-based model that would appear to be Google Earth’s focus (in spite of the sales of Pro and Enterprise editions).

We believe that the WeoGeo model, which combines the marketing of digital data with the services of discovery, customization, hosting, and delivery, as well as the content and derivative license management will help facilitate the expansion of the geospatial content market. A bigger geomarket helps us all generate more revenues, drawing more people and better content to the field.

I’ll match the “content is king” quote with this one, “A rising tide raises all boats.”