I was over at Harvard yesterday talking to people from the GSD, the Herbarium, the Library, the new Center for Geographic Analysis, and MassGIS. It was great to see some old friends and make some new ones. One topic that came up was why you don’t see OGC standards in widespread usage. I argued that the geospatial Web is where the regular Web was in 1996, when the tech industry thought that HTML was so easy and powerful that everyone would build their own Web sites — not by writing HTML but by using tools like Dreamweaver. As it turns out, that was still way too high a barrier to entry. People didn’t want the hassle of designing a site from scratch. They wanted to post a blog entry or a MySpace page. That’s when the Web saw a real quantum leap in content.

So in my mind, there’s a continuum of tech diffusion, where the first stage is raw HTML/XML/KML/URL coding by alpha techies. The second stage is using software tools that automate that raw coding. And the real diffusion comes when companies offer tools that automate 90% of the content creation busywork, and let users compete that last 10% that is unique to their interests. OGC is just moving into the second stage, and we don’t even know what that last stage will look like.

The discussion reminded some of us of an idea we had late in the 1990s that mapping should be as commonplace as spreadsheets. We were wondering whether that type of revolutionary leap could come from the GIS industry or would come from mainstream Web hackers. So it was very timely to wake up today and see this Wired article today about using Google Spreadsheets to create KML. Is this the way most geographic content creation will happen in the future?