Unfortunately the day has come and we have retired our Foursquare account. Things were good while they lasted but now we have to go. The Office of Campus Sustainability will no longer be using Foursquare as a geo-location tool. There are couple of reasons why we are leaving the service (none of which have anything to do with the service provided by Foursquare... they are pretty awesome) but we will still be Green Maps as a tool to map sustainability on campus. Thank you to all the folks out there that contributed to our Foursquare account and who shared our tips. We really do appreciate your interest and we hope to see you again in another social media life. In the meantime, we will be transferring our sustainability 'check-in' tips and lists to the University of Ottawa's main Foursquare account. So don't worry, none of the information will be lost. The Office has had a Green Map account for many years and we hope to soon be launching new features and m...

I, Merissa Mueller, am the conqueror of cartography, maker of maps, artist of the atlas, and most recently the foursquare flunky. See, I’m new to foursquare. I have heard of it, mostly because sometimes on Facebook my homepage decides to tell me the locations of my drunken friends. Other than that, the concept is quite familiar because of my work with mapping but I had no experience with it until recently. I had created a foursquare account quite a while back for the office to which I added “lists” entailing where on and off campus you should visit along with a short “tip” about the building/location. Since I have no access to a smart phone (hell, I don’t even have a real calling plan on my crappy phone, just texting) I couldn’t go much further with our profile than that. I could not “check in” to places, upload photos to my profile, become the “mayor” of a spot and most unfortunately, I could not earn a single badge which made me feel horrible. I mean, even if you’re crappy at ...

Photo credit:  http://www.newspapergrl.com Someday I will be reclined in a psychologist’s lounge chair rhyming off coordinates and datums because I will have finally gone crazy from all the mapping projects I get myself into. Sigh, until then I have found myself a new task for maps on campus. Foursquare: a tool that allows users to explore their surroundings and discover new places. If you use Facebook , you may have noticed that you have a few friends that are constantly “checking-in” to random spots including restaurants, clubs, school buildings, etc. Personally, my phone is not legit enough to handle such applications but I can appreciate the GPS technology used by the program and apparently still get assigned the task of taking advantage of the sustainable capabilities of the service. You may recall me ranting this summer about mapping sustainable transportation on campus and my upcoming accessibility mapping projects- this is a continuation of green mapping and invo...