Platial News and Neogeography

Welcome Wired Readers!

Greetings to all the Wired readers,

Thanks for the traffic, we appreciate it! However, our little robots are trying to cram you through a small pipe.

You may get a couple of errors when browsing the site, we're zealously working on the problem at this moment. Next week, we will be moving to our new servers, which will help with some of these issues.

We appreciate your patience, and thanks for checking out Platial.

--jake

Platial 'Grabber' Firefox Extension

We're here with the 0.1.0 version of the Platial Grabber Firefox Extension. As we introduce new features to this extension, we'll announce them here.

While on the web, you can select any address, right click, and hit 'Grab this Place!"

Install it here: (UPDATE, link pointing to Mozilla)

Platial Grabber Firefox Extension

Note: if the auto-installer doesn't come up, simply choose Open with Firefox, or save it and drag it into the extensions box.

Have fun!

--jake

Franz Ferdinand Links to Platial!

The Death Cab for Cutie and Franz Ferdinand tour map Paiges made on Platial has been linked to from the official Franz Ferdinand fan site.

We are SO EXCITED! (Sorry, didn't mean to shout.)

We can't wait to see fans' concert pictures and stories show up on the map. Thanks for the link, guys.

Virtual France

The IGN (French National Geographical Institute) makes some of the best maps I have ever seen. Real beauties. They have just announced that this summer they are going to come out with a Google-Earth style Virtual France, which they are calling "Geoportail"

Geoportail will only cover French territory, but it will cover it extremely well.

Autobiogeographies

The first Place most people put on the map when they join Platial is home. It might be where they were born, where they live now, where they lived when they were growing up, all the places they have ever lived, where they might live in the future. All of these are ways of thinking about home.

Origins, for better or for worse, are defining. They are one of the important ways in which humans organize information about the world, and especially about the people they encounter. Knowledge of people's geographic origins are repositories of information, impressions, prejudices, images, and preconceived notions of all kinds. It is incredible how useful these can be in navigating a cosmopolitan social world and how heavily we draw from them without even realizing it most of the time. It goes without saying that this human dependence on incomplete and flawed repositiories of goegraphical/anthropological information can also get us into trouble, but especially when one is aware of the limitations and the flaws, it mostly serves to make a person more socially adept. The more a person knows about other cultures and Places the wider the person's potential overlapping social spheres.

Think of the last 10 people with whom you have socialized. Do you know where they grew up? Where they were born? I noticed recently at a party I went to that within a couple hours everyone knew where everyone else was from.

If knowing how to interpret this kind of information is an invaluable skill, then also is knowing how to impart it. Humans are constantly striving to control the message of their their own identities, whether consciously or not. What we tell, how we tell it, and when...
Watching the story of someone's life plot itself out in space and time on a map is one of my favorite things to do on Platial. I've always been fascinated by stories, and these autobiogeographical maps are a new kind of story, or rather the same old story we are always telling, but structured in a new way. They are another tool in the construction of the story of self. Another piece of the documentary so many of us are constantly creating about ourselves.

The Smallest Map in the Whole Wide World

This has already been on Mefi and BoingBoing, as well as NPR's All Things Considered, but it is so amazing that I figured one more blog post about it wouldn't do any harm.

It was made by Paul Rothemund with "DNA origami" and is viewed by using an atomic force microscope to drag a tiny needle across the surface to record the bumps made by the DNA strand.

How big is it? A strand of hair is a little less than 1,000 times wider than the map.

Platial maps on Myspace

This map of free power outlets is an example of the new flash based maps to add Platial maps to a webpage that doesn't allow script&iframe tags, like Myspace.

Make a map, add some Places, and hit publish. Warning: this just got done today, so, test it a bit first, it could burn the house down, and yeah we know it could use a bit of lipstick too. We wanted to get something out to our members who kept bugging us to help them publish on Myspace.

The Stank of Humanity

Florian started a great conversation on shared digital memory at the MediacenterBlog. I had a chance to contribute on Place memory...a topic we're immersed in and obsessed by.

We Blog You

Guerrilla street artists We Kill You have made their mark on Platial, mapping the sites of their exploits in the Toronto area. Also check out their site at WeKillYou.net and their myspace profile.

Featured Explorers

All you narrative mapping fanatics should get a kick out of Platial's new page: the featured Explorer page. It's a bit like a tour guide page, where one person has hand picked, or curated rather, from the pool of Places, maps and people already in the system, a small but focused handful of stuff they'd like others to see in it's own context.

The first featured Explorer is Sylviakulack, whose recent tags currently read, "devil, aztec, street art, mediterranean restaurants". She's got a hilarious intro that reads,

"In north carolina three years ago, my father gives me a map to navigate and it's from 1963. All the roads are different and we get in a big fight over the existence of Interstate 40. Even though there's a huge green sign that says '40' it's not on the map, so for him, it's not really there. This is real map love. Choosing a map over a highway ... Memories of Lanny and Sylvia is both a chronicle and the adventure. I am not always sure where we were until I pick a place and start writing."

Go check out her great picks! It should be fun.