Over at DirectionsMag, Adena Schutzberg has written a short opinion piece on the dumbing down of GIS and its acceptance by wider section of the pulbic. She names a few shortcuts to looking like a GIS professional, including receiving a certification from the GIS Certification Institute and developing mashups.

From the piece: “Those in the geospatial arena certainly see these mashups as skipping over some key parts of the cartographic/GIS process of selecting a projection, scale and quality background data set, creating a data layer and then tweaking the presentation parameters such as color, annotation and marker symbols. These mashups are the ultimate shortcut to an online map; nearly everything is decided for you.”