Platial News and Neogeography

Platial Tip: Search in Span

"Span" refers to the part of the Earth you are currently looking at on a map page. It is possible to center in on one area and search for Places only within that area. Here is how to do it.

1. Zoom in and center your map on the area you are interested in searching.

2. Enter the word or words you want to search for in the "what" box of the blue search bar, but do not plug anything into the "where" box.

3. Now you will see all of the Places matching your search appear in the map.

You can move the map around, zoom out, zoom in, and the search results will change as you do so, to correspond to the current span.

Where'd Ya Get That?

It may be because I am addicted to shoes, and thus biased, but I think that one of the most exciting maps on Platial right now is Wendolyne's San Francisco shopping map, Where'd ya get that?.

It's incredible. The woman obviously knows her way around the city, and her way around a local designers' boutique. I'd like to print this map up and use it as a guide book, except I'd miss the great little video interviews she did with shop owners. Most of the Places have wonderful, long, well-written, funny descriptions. She's not writing the hyped-up, Richy Rich, max out your Visa card shopping guide like you get in a magazine. This is the real-life Glamour Gal who pays her own bills, knows quality when she sees it, and tells it like it is. Of Anthropologie, she writes, "Go straight to the sale racks downstairs unless you grow your dough on trees."

I think making this map must have cost Wendolyne a pretty penny, judging from her descriptions of all of the things she bought while making the rounds to load her map up with photos and to interview the owners.

Next time I'm in SF, I'm definitely going to check out these Places I discovered on the map.

Now You're Talkin' My Language!

We just fixed a bug which had prevented foreign characters from making it from a Platial message to your email inbox intact. Now when you write to your friend in Japanese, the message will not be full of gobbledy-gook!

This is a brand new fix, so please send a message to feedback if you have any trouble with it.

The Great Good Place

Some of you, who have been with us since our early days, might remember our short-lived experiment with a Featured Explorer page. A few of our members went to the trouble of creating tours of our site, most of which we never got to use. I think it is a real shame that we never got to use these, so I'm going to start blogging them.

Keep in mind that these were written a long time ago, so the people who wrote them might have different favorite Places and people by now. (Tell us in the comments if that is so!)

So... introducing Baostar, our featured explorer of the day.

Baostar is one of our earliest and biggest users. He's always giving us fantastic feedback and I think he probably has the most maps of any non-staff Platial member.

The Great Good Place, by Baostar

"This tour is about 'the third place', somewhere people can relax in good company on a regular basis, apart from home and work (the first and second places respectively). It's the cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons, and other hangouts at the heart of communities. I tried to find these 'good places' in different geographical areas on Platial for others to explore. Where's your 'third place' or 'good place'?"

Great third places

Maps with communities' hot spots

Good Company

Neogeography Definition

Someone has posted a definition of Neogeography on Word Spy. (Thanks for the heads up Garyjwood.)

Lost in Translation

Bonjour,

Platial underwent a significant database upgrade tonight. We've converted our storage to better support international characters. This was a short outage only lasting 30 minutes.

This means our non-English users can now enter and view data in their native tongue.

Although rigorous testing has been performed, there is a slight chance a character may have gone gobbly. Please let us know if anything goes awry.

You can reach me at jake (at) platial.com.

--jake

Mapping the Job Habitat

Srehder is working on "mapping the pharmaceutical industry genome." He has written about it on his blog Talent Ecology. He has plans to do more talent mapping and cataloguing for other industries.

Place Blogs

The more I use the new Platial, the more I like Place Blogging. It is really fun to be able to easily see what other people have said about the Places I'm interested in, all on the same page.

We have to work on pulling all of the Places from the previous versions of the site together into their proper Place Blogs, but already there are a lot of interesting pages taking form.

The Platial Place Blog is nice. Anybody who came to our User Love Fiesta a few months back, be sure to click the "been there" button. If you haven't been here, you should come on by. We have a funky place and we like visits.

Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park have nice Place blogs. Add your stories if you've been to either of them. Yankee Stadium is going to be demolished this year. It will be nice to have a scrapbook of people's memories of the Place on Platial.

Minimapper (flock extension)

Tony Farndon has just updated his fantastic Minimapper Flock Etension, and for those of you who haven't yet been exposed, I'm giving a little rundown on its Platial integration right now.

(for those of you also not yet exposed to flock --> it's a new-ish, socially minded web browser for windows, mac and linux - thumbs up - check it out)

Using Minimapper:

After installing it,

Turn it on:

You'll see this appear at the top of your window:

I'd recommend putting the little icon into your flock toolbar for quick on/off access:

When you find an address anywhere online:

and you'd like to save it for a little while, just highlight the address and drag it to the minimapper box that says, "Drop Address or Link".
and you'll see this:

(the title is generated from the page title you are dragging from, so it could be off.)

click on that title, and the map will zoom in to street level.

When you are ready to do something with that address:

Right click, or control click, the title to see the contextual menu:

The 3 Platial options let you:

• see what is happening around that address using the Today Nearby geo-aggregator.
  
• see what Platial members may be saying about the Place (and if it doesn't exist yet, will invite you to be the first)
  or
  
• add it to your own list of saved Places (this works smoothest if you let Platial keep you logged in)

Ok, so that's basically it in a nutshell. To me, minimapper is a great tool that acts like a 'staging area' for Places that you may want to make a map of, and a fun, slim, easy tool built into a similar browser.

Termite Swarm Map

"Find them before they find you", states this map from the Terminix Pest Control website