Platial News and Neogeography

More Madame

I posted about Madame Gonzaga's San Francisco Treats map, but she has been going wild with mapping San Francisco and I wanted to make note of all the maps she has going. She already has 26 maps started!

Some of our first maps on Platial were of good vegetarian restaurants, and now the Madame has thought of the carnivores with Meat Your Maker.

Ze Art of ze Iced Mocha celebrates the city's star barristas.

Summer Fun in ze Mission is a great tour of the Madame's local haunts.

Kipod's Map of Rage

Kipod has a fantastic way of telling these stories. I hope to hear more of them soon.

Dispatch from Beirut

I got an email from a good friend living in Beirut 2 days ago. For anyone who doesn't know, Beirut, and all of Lebanon, is currently under military attack from Israel. I'll just let his email speak for itself as one candid view into a life in the context of war.

He has a couple great links for further reading in the email as well.

On a much lighter note: "structural poetic play"

I'm a big fan of these accounts that create unexpected poetry from the structure of the site.

A fairly new member on Platial named Sideways, has been adding Places with the word sideways to a map called Sideways, and forming a posse of buddies all with sideways icons.

Another of my faves is a member named Laitalp who writes everything sdrawkcab.

And the everpopular georgewbush, who has just posted a video of himself singing the U2 hit "Sunday Bloody Sunday".

Salvage

Just noticed this new map this morning, by Pdxnikkie.

"This map is an ever evolving guide to the free and salvagable sites located throughout inner portland, or. This includes; good dumpsters, fruit trees, community gardens, free corners, restaurants that dump food, free boxes, nut trees, berrybushes, other urban garden spaces..."

It's called, Salvage portland. I added the pear tree out front of Lowbrow.

Seeing this map also reminded me of one of our earliest maps, showing the locations of fruit trees in Los Angeles. Fallen Fruit.

What's up with that huge search bar?

Platial is no longer bashful about its search tool and now that so many fantastic Places have been added all over the world, we wanted to give search (and those Places) a bit more of the spotlight. The main upgrade has been in regards to indexing. This means that multiple term searches actually work now. There is also better response if you type in just an address.

You will also notice a new drop down feature in the navigation. Now you can get right to your own Homepage, Places, Maps, Buddies, Tags and Account from any page, without clicking. This also applies to the Explore tool, and, if you have defined a "Home Base" location in your user account, the Today Nearby link has a dropdown shortcut to your Home Base city. (To define this Home Base, go to your user account page).

You will also notice that we are using Yahoo Local for the business lookup now.

We'd very much like to hear about ANY & ALL of your search anomalies at this point, so we can continue to tweak and twist the results to meet your expectations.
Send your feedback.

More improvements are on the way, so stay tuned.

Uh Oh IE!

Our fabulous new update caused a glitch yesterday morning in the display of maps in Internet Explorer. We have it fixed now but we wanted to apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced by a mapless Platial early yesterday.

We would have posted about this right away, but Typepad was undergoing some maintenance.

Platial Tip: European Addresses

Google recently launched geocoding for more countries, which means that you can enter addresses now in the US, Canada, Japan, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. I have tried out some French addresses and they work great. I'd love to hear from some of our foreign users how well this new feature is working for them.

Thanks Google for the geocoding!

BaoTreats!

Mad Ham Maps Ze Veerdos

Someone asked me recently what I thought the weirdest map on Platial might be. I had to think about it for a minute because there is a little bit of competition for the title, but finally I gave it to this new map by Madame Gonzaga which has been steadily growing over the past couple weeks, called San Francisco Treats.

This is a map, as the Madame herself describes it of, "Those who make ze city ov San Francisco growl, sputter, und sparkle! They run ze joints, own ze shoppes, serve us meats, scour ze warehouses fur vintage goods, mix ze tapes, und pour ze dreenkies zat makeths our Bay area exxxperience ze divine mess."

The map shows short video interviews with over 40 great San Francisco personalities and the descriptions are all written in the voice of a Hungarian Soothsaying Ghost Dog.

Actually, now that I think of it, the competition for weirdest map wasn't really that stiff at all...