Platial News and Neogeography

Adding Places slightly changed

We are going through some changes in the way you add Places to Platial.  The changes are helping us move towards a much simpler, less problematic flow.  But, we also anticipate that a few of you will find the changes surprising and disruptive.

The best way to make sure that these changes are experienced correctly, make sure to clear your browser's cache. 

Tonight a small change has already been slipped in, that the 2 modes for adding Places have been pulled apart.  Now, if you don't know the location, and want to use the gazetteer lookup, you need to click a link that says, "Don't know the exact location? We can try to help you find it."

Expect more changes in the near future, maybe even before morning.
Andy seems to be hacking directly in the live site, uh-oh.
:)

Delete This!

A small but overdue little feature - the ability to get rid of your outdated, empty, duplicate or imperfectly populated maps.

This new delete button is inside the edit area on all of your maps. Just go to one of your maps, and click the edit link.

Not to say that there are maps out there that need to be deleted, quite the opposite in fact, just day after day of great new map ideas coming through. Today's map is the Kitty Cat Map. While I am not a kitty cat kind of person, and not really a pet kind of person at all myself, the cats on this map are pretty damn cute.

1000th

What if we celebrated every 1000th person to tag the same Place, make it like being at the supermarket when that person gets sprinkled with balloons and trumpeteering.

Mardi Gras: The Ghost of Carnival Past

Tracy the Astonishing does it again!  The Ghost of Carnival Past
I've never been to Mardi Gras. But I had always thought that one day I would get there somehow. Yes, yes I know we all say that about a lot of places however I have a point here so bear with me.
Mardi Gras is such an unbelievable event and New Orleans has always impressed me. To see a whole city dedicate so much time and energy to celebration and simply enjoying themselves is rather anti-puritanical and un-American. Or so we say when we talk about the embarrassing excesses of Mardi Gras to our friends (while we secretly checkout ticket prices online, and pack carry on luggage--flip-flops, vitamin B for hangovers and suntan lotion).
And we love it, mind you-- that dichotomy of Love/Hate that New Orleans personifies so very well. Notorious and carnivorous “Crescent City” has been—until recently at least-- one of the last remaining truly mythical places left in America.
When hurricane Katrina hit the southeastern United States, I like many others was devastated. The sheer power of destruction was unreal.  So much for eventually getting to Mardi Gras right? I mean who really thought that one day it would be blown off the map before we could all get there?
Tracy wanted to make a Mardi Gras Map—I flinched. After Katrina, Mardi Gras seemed too touchy. Boy did I miss the point. New Orleans natives and Mardi Gras enthusiasts are not your typical people. Tragedy is a terrible thing, but Celebration and Revelry are a necessity. And so, the French quarter was cleaned, opened and eager for business days after the hurricane. As if the city itself was sighing and saying, "Well, now I really need a drink!"
The city itself is magical. Death, re-birth, and celebration are what true magic and majesty are built on. New Orleans is here to stay. Mardi Gras is here to stay. Yes things have changed. Yes Katrina was and STILL IS a tragedy. But, the party goes on.

See the rest of this posting here Pirate Alley Premonition.

Katrina Charity Links:

MercyCorp  American Red Cross  Volunteeers of America  Food for the Poor

America Cares  Operation USA

State of the Collaborative Atlas: Platial is 2 months old!

We thought our two month anniversary was a good time to share some early results and the reason for our existence.

Platial is building a free Collaborative Atlas to bridge people, neighborhoods and nations and enable people to document experience through geography. We want to illustrate a truly post geo-political world through the voices of its Citizens.

We've taken the first step toward this mission with a platform for adding, storing, sharing, discovering Places and creating custom maps. We recently passed 100,000 Places from partners and our founding members and we're working every day at making our system and experience better and better.

Our Places and Maps range from fairtrade, alternative fuel, people who have changed the world, music tours, UNESCO heritage sites, kid-friendly, gay-friendly, dog-friendly locations and just about anything else people find worthy of contributing.

We're working with the geo community, academics and urban planners in the hopes of using this data to allow all of us to gain some insights about our world.

Our members have been truly fantastic in helping us learn what they want, need and what works/doesn't work about Platial. Please keep the feedback and inspiration coming.

Two weeks ago, we went into deep dev mode again to incorporate all of this incredible feedback and next week we will release the fruits of our collective labor. We've deployed new features, content partners and bug fixes sometimes hourly in the past two months, but we think this next release will be special. Over the coming months we''ll continue to build out this platform and learn from our members.

A Little About Our Team
Platial is a team of nine place adoring engineers, PhDs, entrepreneurs and user advocates based in and around Portland & Boston.
Anselm Hook (Thingster, P2P Maps, Civic Actions,CivicMaps, CivicMaps Tile Engine, Locative.net, Ning)
Chris Goad (MapBureau, Longtime geo geek and visionary who wrote the FABL language)
Jay Hargis (Ultimate Bet, JCal, JPX-WDDX)
Jake Olsen (Urbanverb, Architectural Heritage Center)
Jason Wilson (0009, HERE game, Community-centric Marketing, Tall-bikes, video, psychogeography)
Di-Ann Eisnor (Eisnor Interactive, Community-centric Marketing, HERE game)
Tracy Rolling Brunar (La Superette, LiveJournal Dolls, International Scavenger Hunt)
Chris Henderson (Music like this and that)
Paige Saez (Biker, artist, friend who showed up one day because she had become our first obsessed user and hasn't left since.)

A Few Notable Maps:
NY Street Food
Coldplay tour + hostels + fairtrade
Knitting
Women Who Changed the World
Biodiesel
Weird Things That Happened to Me
Hopeless Romantic
Fairtrade
Best Bike Spots Toronto
Political Cartoon Controversy

It's interesting to see how people have been telling stories through these maps. We have no idea how people will use Platial over time but I can't wait to see.

Emotional Geography

Emotional geography has been very popular on Platial. The most comprehensive of these maps is the first one to have appeared on the site, Paiges's Hopeless Romantic Map. She's a collector of poignant moments and there's not a person over the age of 16 who doesn't have something to add to this collection.

I am also very fond of Sylviakulack's map Memories of Lanny and Sylvia.

Here are some of my favorite Places for Valentine's Day

Society of the Spectacle

inspiring excerpt. can't resist sharing:

History, which threatens this twilight world, is also the force which could subject space to lived time. Proletarian revolution is the critique of human geography through which individuals and communities have to create places and events suitable for the appropriation, no longer just of their labor, but of their total history. In this game's changing space, and in the freely chosen variations in the game's rules, the autonomy of place can be rediscovered without the reintroduction of an exclusive attachment to the land, thus bringing back the reality of the voyage and of life understood as a voyage which contains its entire meaning within itself.

The greatest revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not itself urbanistic, technological or esthetic. It is the decision to reconstruct the entire environment in accordance with the needs of the power of the Workers' Councils, of the anti-statist dictatorship of the proletariat, of enforceable dialogue. And the power of the Councils which can be effective only if it transforms existing conditions in their entirety, cannot assign itself a smaller task if it wants to be recognized and to recognize itself in its world.

Robot Map

Micropopetah has been working on a great humanoid robotics map called Tuketah today that i just thought deserved a bit of recognition. It features sporting robots!!

"Where's the video?", you ask?
Right here!

Olympic Torino & More

The Olympics make headlines! And there are so many subtle stories to tell that intersect with this huge world-class event, so many histories, so much nuanced info that can be paid attention to now that google maps has pushed out this Italian street data.

Google Maps Mania has a short list of a few people doing mashups with Olympic Games Sites. Tagzania was one of the first to exploit the new data.

It's funny to see how far off you can be in plotting data without any road data to work from, this Dolceacqua Place is terribly wrong. Oops. Can you find the real Dolceacqua?

Your Buddies Places

Finally, you can view all of Your Buddies Recent Places at one URL www.platial.com/username/shared

or Just go to your Platial profile page: platial.com/username and click the bright red View Your Buddies button.

Your Profile Page with New Link to Buddies

Your Buddies Places (Map and listings view)