Archive for March 26th, 2009

iMapWeather addictive, timely social network about weather

Yesterday the Balcom Agency launched iMapWeather,. The Nerdery had the fine, fine pleasure of helping them build this social network that lets people connect about all things weather related.

It seems like an odd bit of magical synchronicity that iMapWeather launches while North Dakota faces the worst floods they’ve seen since 1997, in fact the Red River is expected to crest this weekend more than a foot above 1997′s record-setting level. The Nerdery is keeping a close eye on the situation in ND. In fact, Tom O’Neill has rustled up a gang of nerds to head up to Fargo this weekend and help with the sandbagging efforts.

Now, thanks to iMapWeather, I can’t seem to stop watching a live shot of the river in Grand Forks that a user posted.

And this is just what the creators of iMapWeather were going for.

“We looked around and said, ‘All right there’s nothing out there that offers people a real way to connect through the weather,’” Chip Hanna, Interactive Account Director at Balcom Agency, said. “There’s nowhere else that you can upload photos, share video and other information all related to the weather.”

iMapWeather is a joint venture between Balcolm Agency and Weather Decision Technologies, The Nerdery helped them bring their vision to life.

Next week we’ll tell you about how that vision came about and what we did to help it along.

Profiles in Nerdery: Mike Woods, seriously.

• Astrological Sign: Cancer: shy, assertive, and loyal.
• Time at the Nerdery: ~1 year.
• Area of expertise: Getting it done.
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: I shrug.
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: All of them.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: That we have this annoying blogger who bugs me to do things that I really don’t want to do.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1.) Twitter(@woods); 2.) Bug or Feature; 3.) Conversations you should never have over IM; 4.) Things that won’t work in IE6; 5.) @wiley_the_dog twitter status; 6.) Seriously you want to work on my team. Seriously.; and 7.) Apple.
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: Lisa Simpson.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: Of course I do.