Platial News and Neogeography

Platial - Back in action & now with Google Maps 2

So, it is true, we basically fell on our face and lay there, writhing around, in public, for most of the day today. Mark Frauenfelder's post on BoingBoing brought us a whole mess of potential new auto-bio-geographers, and we crashed, over and over and over right in front of all of them.

The site is now back up and running, and we'd like to send a big apology to all of you out there who had a terrible time with it today, and to Mark, for letting down his readers.

But, life goes on, we have gotten back on our feet, and we return with a few cool improvements that you may like to hear about.

The main upgrade is that we have migrated to the new Google Maps 2 which brings you the following features:

• Dramatically better Satellite Images around the globe.
• Road data for:
• France
• Germany
• The Netherlands
• Belgium
• Sweden
• Norway
• Denmark
• Poland
• Slovakia
• The Czech Republic
• Hungary
• Switzerland
• Austria
• Italy
• Spain
• Finland
• Luxembourg
• And even parts of
• Greece
• Serbia
• Macedonia
• Turkey
• and Moscow
• A little map in the map, that can help bring context to what you are looking at.
• Fewer memory leaks!!! This is great news for people who were getting crashed browsers after using Platial for extended periods of time.

Here is an example of the new zoom levels in Amsterdam:

A few new bugs may have joined us in this release, so, as always, please let us know if you are having any trouble using the site, it really does help out.

Platial is not having a massage.

We are working very hard at the moment to bring back your directory of wonderful maps.

We'll need a massage once this is over.

Thanks for being patient.

Welcome BoingBoing readers:

Thanks for stopping by, we are having a bit of a bottleneck at the front door however. If you find the site to be terribly slow, your best bet will be to bookmark it and come back a little later. I guess this could be considered 'proof of beta'.

Sexy GPS Shoes at Eyebeam

Here is a blurb from the site

The Aphrodite Project LLC is pleased to announce the launch of Platforms, a new line of footware specifically designed for sex work. Platforms are both an homage to Aphrodite and her prostitute-priestesses as well as a practical tool for the contemporary sex worker. With Platforms, we have created a seamlessly integrated system of shoes and online services. Our shoes use the latest technology to bring sex workers on par with other public workers, whose lives are valued highly because they work in dangerous professions that serve the needs of the community.

With the push of a button, these 'safety' shoes can send emergency help messages to several desired recipients. They also include other utilitarian features such as an "audible alarm system", a "hidden safety compartment", and a connection to a shared "problem client blog".

The shoes are rigged with a customized version of Rave Wireless's Rave Guardian and a GPS system, anabling the user/wearer these tools:

• With the press of a button, you can send an emergency signal to sex workers rights groups and/or the police with your location.


• This helps to eliminate the “consensual” argument - if it was consensual, you wouldn’t have pressed the emergency button.
  
Sending the signal to sex workers rights groups allows them to monitor the police.

• If the police don’t show up, both you and the sex workers rights group have a record of your call, and police negligence.
  
You choose who gets to see the signal and who doesn’t, and you can turn the tracking off at any time.

• It’s not just for help -- you can also use the GPS system to locate your friends and co-workers.


• This technology is gaining widespread acceptance on college campuses across the country. Rave Wireless's Rave Guardian, allows students that feel unsafe to use their mobile phone as a personal alarm device. Students initiate a timer on their mobile phone. If the timer expires before the student turns it off, Rave Guardian uses the e911 infrastructure to locate the phone and let local authorities know to check on the student. Learn more about Rave Wireless at www.ravewireless.com or email [email protected].

This stimulates me to think about stuff like, GPS+DDR & downloadable custom alarm 'ringtones' for the shoes.

If you are in NYC stop by Eyebeam to see what should be a very interesting demo of these shoes:
Eyebeam (www.eyebeam.org)
540 W. 21st St. NYC, May 2-13

Saturday May 13 at Eyebeam:

* 4pm : Platforms panel discussion: Sovereign Whores and Seditious Technology
Moderated by Amanda McDonald Crowley, featuring Krzysztof Wodiczko, Tracy Quan, Natalie Jeremijenko and Melissa Gira

* 4-6pm : Live demo-performance of Platforms shoes
* 6-8pm : Reading and booksigning by Tracy Quan
Melissa Gira presents '30 Second Sex,' a collaborative webcam performance with Anna Voog and Echo Transgression
Music by DJ Natural Sphere
Closing reception

Neogeography and Blogs

Hi everyone! I have been asked to guest blog about my use of neogeography so here I go.

I started blogging after I noticed geography has been an overlooking field in blogging. Sure there were excellent cartographic blogs and geopolitical blogs but no geography blogs. I launched Geographic Travels with Catholicgauze! to fill this gap. Catholicgauze is my alter ego and the blog allows me to write anything I want without worrying about the horribly long and painful process of getting a paper published in an academic journal. I blog mostly about human geography but will periodically venture into physical geography. 

Recently I was looking for a way to categorize my blog posts but the normal list system was not panning out well. After doing some blog searches I discovered neogeography and Platial. I realized then a map would be a great way to categorize posts from a geography blog. So I created Catholicgauze’s Atlas and imbedded it onto my blog.

Neogeography and blogging in general have a bright future together. Interactive maps can allow a high school blogger to better describe her trip to Europe. A genealogist blogger can show the spatial distribution of his ancestors. The opportunities are almost endless.

Neogeography has a promising future in its own right. Geography is a constantly expanding field and a willing adopter of technology like remote sensing and geographic information system. These technologies however are expensive and complicated. Online mapping; on the other hand, is free and easy. This appeals to the common man and creates popular interest which will drive innovation. While neogeography will not revolutionize culture; tools like Google Earth, Platial, and others have greatly contributed to global awareness and will continue to do so.

Updated Activist Atlas

  "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed it is the only thing that ever has."   Margaret Mead

We have received overwhelming responses from our Activist Outreach and the community here at Platial continues to grow. I am proud to announce that our Atlas now has 58 maps!
Please continue to keep creating resource maps and I will gather them up and add them to the Atlas. New to the Atlas: A section dedicated to Community Gardens and a section on Healthcare and Social Services as well as a bunch more resources for Environmental Action. I am so proud of everyone's contributions. To have your map added to the Atlas please add your map url to a comment on the posting.

Activist Atlas Permalink

http://platial.typepad.com/news/2006/03/here_is_a_compi.html

flux

Tactilicious Haptic Tactics

We'll start this post with a small quote from peripheralfocus's description of its Palpable City project:

The project allows walkers to feel the spatial form of the urban grid at their location as vibro-tactile rhythms on their body. 

Tactile displays are usually applied to provide orientation information in unusual phenomenal environments, such as virtual reality, deep sea diving, and zero gravity environments. In Palpable City, this process is reversed; instead of providing a stable spatial reference in unusual conditions, the technology is used to make the usual experience of space unusual.

Not surprisingly, this does remind me of sonic city:

Sonic City is a new form of interactive music instrument using the city as an interface. It enables users to create a real-time personal soundscape of electronic music by walking through and interacting with urban environments. Paths are considered as musical compositions and mobility through the shifting contexts of a city as a large scale musical gesture.

There is some kind of potential here, imagine, in a place memory kind of way, that we could upload our own shape files for these haptic navigation systems to pick up on, creating a vibro-tactile mesh of intermingling information out in the world.  Public space could become an opt-in sensorial labyrinth of meta data, a meaningful texture, a corporeal techno-braille, similar in some ways to François Sudre's depiction of a world where everyone is fluent in his Universal Musical Language of "Solresol".  For example, those fluent in Solresol would be able to recognize and read the literal meaning created by the coincidental arrangement of colored garments in a crowd, or would be able to carry on 2 distinct but simultaneous conversations, one through conventional words, and the second through the newly developed musical words. 

Can we think of Palpable City as an experiment in Augmented Reality?  Could these haptic data streams be delivered live? to redirect traffic, or to keep people away from a dangerous chemical leak?  or to sell them junk food? 

What is the granularity level we can achieve with these sensations?  Will we all have personalized 'ringtones' in the haptic future?

Palpable City link via

networked_performance

Platial, now in Korean (and Arabic, and Hindi, and French....)

Some of you may have already noticed that it is now possible to write about Places using non-English characters.

LOST

I am not obsessed with the TV show Lost. While it is true that I think about one of the plot twists, or ponder some mystery of the show pretty much every day, I have yet to allow myself to indulge in true obsession.

I did get a little taste of it, though, recently, when I discovered this map of Lost Places by Burk504. I liked it, and started adding pictures to it. Then I started adding some places. Then I started doing a little research on fansites. Then I went looking for some video clips to add. Listened to a couple podcasts, lurked a few forums... well, you get the picture. It is a slippery slope.

The map has over 50 Places on it so far, but it's definitely not complete. Hopefully some other losties will join in and help add Places to it, and comment on the Places already on there.

One thing that is cool about mapping Lost Places is that you get a nice, visual picture of the geographical coincidences from the show.

In other Lost map news, I made a quick map based on a list of Lost filming locations I ran across while doing my "research." I also found a map similar to ours, but more lean, on a really great Lost site called Sledgeweb's Lost Site. I spent way too much time pouring over the great analysis of the map from Lost on this Iowa State University webpage. (Don't you guys have homework to do?)