The staff at Office for Coastal Management get a lot of technical questions and provide a lot of answers, but those answers don’t generally get published even if they might be common issues. Sounds like material for a big page of frequently asked questions. However, a big FAQ doesn’t allow other people to add comments, clarifications, or new ideas. In addition, there are times when we’d like to put some ideas out there for the community to chew on without requiring or implying the corporate seal of approval.
After thinking about a number of options, like the aforementioned FAQ, forum, or listserve, we’ve decided to go with a blog. We think the blog offers the flexibility we’re looking for and we’re willing to dive in and give it a try. So, what will this look like and what are the rules of the game?
We expect there will be a number of different authors of blog posts covering a range of topics. Many of the topics will be in some way geospatial, including programming tricks and trends for dealing with geospatial data, but we’ll also delve into broader areas. Authors will be identified individually so you’ll know where to start if you want to contact us on a topic. Posts will have some basic spelling and grammar checks, but don’t expect the kind of polish you would find in our usual outreach material (we’d never get a post finished). We also look for some interesting posts from outside the organization too, including from partner organizations and other federal agencies.
You’re encouraged to provide comments. Especially comments that add to the discussion or let us know of topics you’d like to see discussed. Since we’re a government site, we’ll have to have some sort of moderation to eliminate inappropriate posts. Civil discussion is appropriate regardless of whether or not it agrees with blog, as long as it is on topic. All the topics should be of some technical nature, so that shouldn’t be a difficult bar to get over.
Hope you’ll be joining us.
This site is owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration‘s Office for Coastal Management and is part of the Digital Coast. Contact us at coastal.info@noaa.gov.
Digital Coast GeoZone 
What are some really great paying coastal jobs out there? Ones that provide an office atmosphere mixed with a physical atmosphere along the coast?
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Kellin,
There are lots of great jobs in the coastal zone. Far too many to create a comprehensive list. You may want to think about what sector of the economy you’re interested in and examine its attributes in the coastal zone using the Economics National Ocean Watch Explorer (coast.noaa.gov/enowexplorer).
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Hi, When I first came to this website there was a nice write up of the limitations and notes regarding to what the data may, or may not be, suited. Once we click on the website this information disappears, and I could not find it again. I was hoping that the next time I visited this “disclaimer” page would reappear, but it didn’t. It is very important that end-users can refer to the limitations of any dataset, and I would like to again. Where is this information available on the website, or how can I navigate back to that opening page?
Thank you.
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J,
You may have to help me out a little with what pages brought you to this one. This “about” page is just about the GeoZone blog, not the entire Digital Coast. It sounds like you came from a page on the Digital Coast that described a data set or a collection of data sets. In that case, you may be looking for something under http://coast.noaa.gov/dataregistry. Can you tell me what type of data it was? I may be able to give a better answer.
– Kirk
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I love this. You guys are awesome. Such a great way to engage with the public.
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