I will refrain from guessing anything specific, since I had too many opportunities to peruse NI's User Profile data during my NI days.
But I will take the opportunity to lay out an idea that I had. I would love to see a world map that has a little push-pin icon on it representing every contributor here who chooses to participate. I have the feeling that the community is surprisingly Euro-dominated, and such a map would reveal just how much so.
Aside from just being neat, the map could also provide an impetus for participants to communicate a little more with neighbors, and potentially get together in real life. Each little participant icon could also serve as a hyperlink elsewhere--perhaps to the corresponding user page at forums.ni.com by default, but potentially to other places as well.
I think that the new
Google Maps is going to offer a simple way to realize this vision sometime soon, but for the moment they don't permit the saving of custom maps. There are some enterprising people out there who have cobbled together a tentative service that takes advantage of the Google API (see
myGmaps), but it's limited to 10 locations per map, so it's not practical for our situation (assuming more than ten of us would participate).
Is anyone else interested in this? Any thoughts on existing services or APIs that could make it a reality? Obviously, someone will suggest doing it in LabVIEW, and that's not a bad idea, but it might be nicer to hop aboard a commercial product and thus take advantage of the work of its development team.
--John
("Stuck in Tampa," in more than one way if my push-pin icon sees the light of day at some point)
