Platial News and Neogeography

Open Street Map Party

Steve Coast from Open Street Map came by a little before 2 yesterday with the sad news that the airline had misplaced his luggage containing all of his gps devices and handouts. Luckily, among us all, there were a few gps gadgets to use, so Jason and Steve were able to amble around all the foot trails of Irving Park. We split up into pairs and went off with paper maps to annotate. I was paired with Caton, who discovered Platial through the new Nearby iPhone app, and who found out about the mapping party by reading our blog. We recorded some bus stops, convenience stores, a parking lot, traffic medians, and, most excitingly, a brand-new one-way street.

When we got to Tiny's, Steve opened up OSM and taught us how to redraw the map and add all the points of interest we'd recorded on paper. The basic interface for using OSM is fairly easy, but you have to learn the lingo a little to tag things properly. It's a bit of a rush changing the map. I recorded a bunch of medians on Martin Luther Kind Boulevard and it was a powerful feeling marking them.

Caton and I were marking things on the paper map and also adding places to Platial using Nearby. I could easily imagine a mobile OSM interface, at least for points of interest. Something that had drop-down menus of some kind for tagging would be great.

Open Street Maps is an inspiring project. I'm glad to have gotten the opportunity to contribute something and I look forward to doing more in the future. Here are some pictures from our stop at Tiny's.

Announcing "Nearby", Platial's new native app for the iPhone & iPod Touch

For those who have been waiting, and those who had no idea it was coming to this, we are proud to announce our first stab at a Platial client for the iPhone.

The angle we took for this app is a little different than Platial's main role on the web. With Nearby, we challenged ourselves to really keep it simple, and local. We have restricted all the queries to only care about your actual physical location. Hopefully this means a simpler interface, and a more directed experience. We still have many issues to work through, both on the performance and the data sides, but we hope it's stable and fun enough to use on a daily basis as it is. It's never been so easy to capture your life on a map!

The main features that really help it stand out from the crowd are:

• No registration required, even for adding and saving your favorite spots


• Access to the incredible world of hand made Collections from Platial's existing member base


• The optional ability to merge the device with a Platial account, giving you a powerful publishing tool in your pocket

So, if you have the new iPhone operating system (a free update in iTunes) with App Store, install Nearby, give it a spin, and let us know what it still needs.

Come help map Portland

In Portland? Love Mapping? Please join us tomorrow at 2pm...

Join Platial in hosting a map party for OpenStreetMap

About OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is a voluntary not-for-profit organisation that anyone, anywhere can join. The goal of OSM is to provide free map data that can be used by anyone. All of our maps are freely available on the internet at www.openstreetmap.org. Why would anyone want to do that? Aren't there are lots of free maps out there? Most of the maps that you come across on the internet or in your home are protected by very stringent copyright laws. These rules stop the maps from being used in unique and unexpected ways, stifling people's creativity and imagination.

A mapping party is where a group of openstreetmappers and novices descend on an area to map it exhaustively, usually over a weekend. It's a very social event where people can meet up and talk (usually at a pub) in between mapping sessions. A mapping session consists of dividing up an area between participants and mapping it, be that by car, cycle or walking.

Tomorrows Mapping Party starts at Platial

635 NE Going Street @ 7th at 2pm.
There will be a little food and drink.
There will be GPS units to lend out-although feel free to bring your own
Platial will have a few iPhones to lend out for trying our new iPhone app (now in the store)

We'll have you back at OSCON by 6pm.

RSVP appreciated.

Bug Fixes In!

Some sorely needed bug fixes got in today related to deleting places, adding images, bulk upload and so much more. This took longer than it should have. We've been all hands on deck with the iPhone app and we're seriously short on resources right now. Everyone who signed up to beta test the iPhone app will receive an invitation tomorrow- thanks so much and Happy Mapping!

Terra-WebCam

From the digital art collective Pleix.

Biggest Pet Map + Widget! Get your Maps up on Widgetbox!

Just today I noticed that PetBrags had published their adorable map on Widgetbox. How cool! Way to go, PetBrags!

We have a bunch of cool maps up on Widgetbox, including another one put their by its owner, Great Places to Sail by Turinas. That map and the Shark Attack map by Bianca2000 are in the top 10 most popular map apps on Widgetbox.

One of the cool things about Widgetbox (and there are many, many cool things!) is that they have an app accelerator to help you get your maps on Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, and soon also Myspace. If you'd like to get your own map into the Widgetbox gallery and turn it into a facebook app, watch this video I made:

A Glimpse Of The World Around Me

We're in a soul searching phase here at Platial; looking inside, looking outside and acknowledging how much work has been done in the building of the geoweb and the solidification of neogeography as a worthy effort in the past 3 years. As we look out at all of the knowledge that has been collected, aggregated and annotated it is truly inspiring. We're staring out at a world of information and access which is very different from when we started Platial. Google MyMaps, Open Streetmaps, Wikimapia, Everyscape, Outside.in, and a new group of mobile focused folks like Loopt and Socialight. Annotation abounds and it's exhilarating. Overnight, Apple's iPhone is going to make this information more accessible, interesting and urgent. Every one of these projects has a unique approach to making sense of the world around us from the perspective of people everywhere. We didn't expect it all to come together so fast and in so many interesting ways.

So, where does Platial/Frappr go from here? That's what we're thinking about these days. Maybe you are thinking about where you go now as well. In case you are, I thought I'd share a few ideas from The Art Of Travel that are helping me rediscover the original spark of our work.

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In 1873 Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about travel. "He distinguished between collecting facts of life like an explorer or academic and using known facts to the end of inner psychological enrichment." He believed in the value of the latter. 
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"Instead of bringing back 1600 new plant species we may have a collection of small, unfeted but life changing thoughts."
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Alexander von Humboldt (Naturalist and Explorer) journeyed to South America motivated by a ''longing to be transported from a boring daily life to a marvelous world.'' He did so much more in adding to the scientific knowledge of the world.
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"The needle of his curiosity led him to his own magnetic north".
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In Xavier de Maistre's Nocturnal Expedition Around my Bedroom he pioneered room travel, which he believed might be more practical for those neither as brave nor wealthy as real world explorers - and for those afraid of storms, robbers and high cliffs.
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How can we better notice or rediscover what we have already seen? Maybe by seeing the world through the eyes of the people who travel the streets every day. By accepting a travel mindset in the places we go every day.

Hard to answer succinctly "What Problem Does It Solve?" when we're still out exploring, sharing, collecting and working at sating our collective curiosity about the world around us. (Hard for me anyway- feel free to let me know if you've nailed it).

But anyway we carry that curiosity around wherever we go even if its the corner store. For us, just glimpsing all that exists around us is hugely enriching, even marvelous.

Lat Long Snow Sculpture

Jaume Plensa & Norman Foster created this sculpture as part of The Snow Show in Sestriere, Italy.

It's hard to get a reading on the scale of it, but it seems apparent that controlled melting is the means by which it was made.

Construction paper topo

art by Jen Stark

City Distances

How often are 2 or more cities mentioned on the web in the same sentence, or web page? Does this textual/contextual proximity indicate anything palpably similar about the places? This visualization represents an outstanding connection between New York City and London, far surpassing any other relationships on the map (the algorithm is fairly complex, but basically the score goes up the farther away the paired places are). I'm curious what role the English language (or English place names) plays in this study, and to what degree the internet has, or hasn't, expanded beyond these confines. Does this map simply show us that the 2 major cultural (as well as population and connectivity) capitals of the English speaking world are often mentioned in the same breath? I'd like to see a visualization representing the frequency of the most common place names mentioned on the web (maybe the top 1000 or so), which places are simply the most talked about in general?