Platial News and Neogeography

Cacophony Society

I had been saving this one to post right before Santacon, but then I plumb forgot! Oh well, better late than never.

Kevans has a wonderful map of Cacophony Society action sites, history, and significant Places.

All of the places have great articles connected to them. Here's an excerpt from PETA vs. Veget-Aryans: Final Battle!

A roar of chain saws overpowered a nearby didgeridoo player. Weirdos dressed as animal-faced butchers, Charlie Manson, Farmer Vin-cent, and Leatherface tossed hunks of seared meat into the crowd. The smell of flesh mingled with that of patchouli, sandalwood, and sweat. A woman drenched in blood tossed GPC cigarettes and chicken claws at children. It was a hideous spectacle, one that should have warranted serious peace-love-and-granola retaliation, but the sunny municipality of Berkeley was caught completely off guard. Thank god for the Veget-Aryans who were on hand in military force to protest the bloody-mindedness of PETA. They goose-stepped through the ranks wearing creased brown shirts and crossed carrot-stick armbands. They carried "Meat Is Murder" placards and shouted, "We can smell you from here!" Meat flew. Bullhorns blared. Kids smoked. It was grimy chaos.

Cacophony Society official site

Santacon on Platial

Got Your Paramorphoscope?

Just a quick little neogeographic blurb from the new Pynchon novel Against the Day :

"if one accepts the idea that maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again, we may say that the paramorphoscopes of Iceland spar ... reveal the architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude."

This comes at a moment in the story where the Chums of Chance are looking for a map, a lost map, that has been (physically/visually) encrypted using a series of double-refracting distortion mirrors made from a special Icelandic mineral. The encryption/decryption device is a paramorphoscope, (2 simple versions shown below) but each one is unique, and the adjustments made to the alignment of its various elements can be constructed in such a complex way that even if the device were found, but misaligned, the decryption attempt would fail.

The basic concept of geographic projection has a lot to do with this notion of the relationship and distortion between 2 and 3 dimensional objects. Pynchon takes the notion a bit further, (borrowing from ancient mystical traditions) considering the 3 dimensional world as a (relatively flawed) transdimensional projection of a higher/richer/deeper reality. The Chums may find themselves seeking a map of parageographical* terrain.

*another debatable term

A couple mapkits

OnoKindGridz has been busy mapping mapping favorite restaurants. There is also a delightful Flickr gallery, where Onolicious boasts, "i ate most everything you see here. yesh!"

Rippinskiers, which is a really nice Colorado ski blog, has just set up a MapKit for its visitors.

Abstractor

Turn any annoying public video ad display into a beautiful work of public art with Abstractor

Click To Play

BioGeoMorphism

Platial Tip: Custom Icons in MapKits

Now that we've changed the MapKit code, the way for you to use your own custom map pins has also changed. Here's how to use your own markers in your new MapKit.

You take the MapKit code we generate for you, then go right before the line that says MapKit.display(); and insert the following lines after a new script tag.

MapKit.baseMarker = "http:urlofyourmarker.png";
MapKit.hoverMarker = "http:urlofyourmarker.png";
MapKit.focusMarker = "http:urlofyourmarker.png";
MapKit.shadowMarker = "http:urlofyourmarker.png";

The line that says MapKit.display(); has to be at the end, and don't forget to close the script tag.

Stay Golden

Some of you have noticed already that some maps now have golden outlines around their icons, and you may be wondering, "What's up with that?"

Just before the end of the year, we decided to create this simple graphic cue to give special attention to maps we think are good. We tried to remember and find all of the great maps, but we may have missed some. If you think your map deserves to be gilded, or if you have a favorite map that deserves the honor, leave a comment here to let us know about it.

The maps that have the gold border appear in the list on our front page.

Talking about OS and "Mash Ups"

BBC Radio 4 ran a story the other day about open source software development and "mash ups". The show is called New Wave Computing. They interviewed Paul Sterne of Open-Xchange, Peter Yared from ActiveGrid, John Newton and John Powell from Alfresco, Scott Dietzen from Zimbra, Paul Radamacher from Google, technology writer Paul Saffo, and Platial's own Di-Ann Eisnor.

Some Sites Using our Maps

Monkeyjedi has mapped his list off places to find free wifi in Melbourne and has published the map on his blog.

I don't read Chinese, but that hasn't prevented me from admiring the blog Moving by Philip, who lives in Taipei, Taiwan. He has a nice MapKit in his side bar and several iframe maps in blog posts.

Zeeb's Place is a nice personal blog and the MapKit shows the places he's visited.

New England Meat

The only thing I like better than a good story is a good meal.

Since the beginning on Platial, food mapping has been one of the biggest trends. Recently I noticed a new kind of food map we hadn't seen before. Where to find Emu meat, venison, elk, bison...

This map belongs to a great website called New England Grown. They've also got working farms and B&B's covered, and I didn't even know that there were any wineries in New England.

Great site!