Platial News and Neogeography

geotagged photos visualization

USA guitar

The Isle of California

Strange Maps has the back story on this map

A Campaign to Save Rural Post Offices

A Post Office is a community hub. I grew up in the Midwest, where for a town to feel "real" it needed only three things: a church, a tavern, and a Post Office. This is Money has been running a campaign to save rural Post Offices in the UK, which are being shut down for budgetary reasons.

They write: "Financial Mail reporter Toby Walne has travelled thousands of miles campaigning for the heart of communities from Land's End to John O'Groats. To kick off we've plotted some examples from his impressive archive of reports and pictures - with much more to come. But we want you to get involved."

You can read the stories on the map to get a real understanding of what the local Post Office means to these communities and to be inspired by stories of the creative ideas people are finding to help keep the Post Offices alive. This is Money readers are contributing information about their own endangered Post Offices. One Post Office manager from Baltasound, Unst writes, "A large part of my job is equivalent to a social service. I must stay open for the community - it's not about making money.

"If the post office closed, there would be nowhere left on the island to provide postal and benefit needs. Elderly people would be forced to catch a ferry to another island to pick up their pensions - an appalling state of affairs."

Mapping For Good

Being Portlanders, we have a special place in our hearts for activism and do-gooder mapping examples. My favorite recent use case is Health Care That Works this which also gives me pretty map envy. The people, the project and the maps are worthy of this mention.

From their blog "This fall, The Opportunity Agenda worked with a coaltion of New York City health advocates to influence the recommendations of The Berger Commission (aka the Commission on Health Care Facilities in the Twenty First Century, aka the hospital closures commission), which was tasked with "right sizing" New York's ailing Health Care system. As part of our work, we tried to conceive of an innovative way to show average New Yorkers the disproportionate - and negative - impact that hospital closures would have on low-income communities and communities of color."

Two New NewsMapper Examples

A while back, we announced our partnership with Canwest Mediaworks, Canada's largest media company. We have been testing a MapKit application called Newsmapper with them before releasing more broadly to media sites and publishers. Here are two new examples they launched last week which deserve shout-outs. Broader launch coming soon but if you're going to be at We Media this week, I'll be there too and we can chat about it!

 

Dearest Canadians, please celebrate Valentine's Day with Canada.com and memorialize your first kiss...

Edmonton Journal readers, please feel free to browse this. They've opted not to offer comments or additions at this time but you can email them your recommendations.

carbonated vernacular

Do you call the fizzy sugar water 'pop' or 'soda'? It's one small but commonly noticed east vs west coast difference in talkin'. Matthew T Campbell, of Oklahoma's East Central University has put together this stunning visualization of the data, showing the clear fault lines in this .

In related turf, The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee's Linguistics Department has a fairly robust Mapping of their Dialect Survey, with all kinds of comparisons from pronunciation of mayonnaise, to nomenclature of grassy areas to the nuances of standing in, or on line for something.

Go have a gander, it's exactly the kind of information that can help remind us all that our way isn't the only way, or even the most common way.

New MapMaker

Yesterday morning we launched a new MapMaker which we have been working on for a while. I want to thank our beta tester members who gave early feedback on the tool and especially big thanks to baostar and ourfounder, who came online and did some debugging with us right before deploy. It's a huge help having extra eyes on the site in those crunch hours before launch.

The new tool puts you in a nicely focused map-making mode so you don't ever feel like you're not really sure where you are or you're not sure which map your Places are landing on.

Clicking on MapMaker at the top of the page will get you into the new tool for building a whole new map. If you want to use it to add Places to one of your existing maps, you just click the new "Add Places" button under the map in the footer. You can also edit the Places you have on the map in this mode, or remove Places from the map.

You can easily get to the map description and icon and to your publishing options by using the tabs in the side bar of the MapMaker.

More Ways to get Your Information on the Map

Another great thing that the MapMaker does is to pull together the more radical fast-track place-adding tools we've been building.

We've brought the bulk upload tool out from the basement of the user home page and put it right at your fingertips. There's a link on the add Places tab for downloading an example file you can use as template for putting together your own bulk files. Bulk upload is limited to a few thousand Places at a time. If you go over the limit, you'll get a message on screen to let you know.

The feed mapper tool is brand new and is still being perfected. Try it out and let us know what we can do to make it work better for you. Jason has been using the feed tool to map his Flickr photos. You can't add markers in feed mode by clicking on the map yet, but intersections work great. If you try a feed and it doesn't work, send us a feedback email including the feed url and we'll see what we can do. The tool came out of a project we did for mapping news feeds and it's a lot of fun to play with.

Get those Maps out in the World
The third tab of the MapMaker is dedicated to helping you get maps up on your own site. Simple versions of any map on Platial can be published by anyone. Your own maps can be put out on the web as MapKit widgets. MapKit allows you to put a map out there for your readers to contribute to and it allows you to put all of your information about your Places out on your own site--not just markers and titles.

The big piece that is still missing from MapMaker is the ability to add existing Posts about Places to your maps. This is coming soon, and you can still add existing information in the old ways, with the "add to map" button under the Place descriptions.

You also cannot delete a Place completely from Platial inside the MapMaker tool, only remove the Place from your map. To delete the Place you have to click on "edit" on the Place detail under the map and then click on the delete button at the bottom of that form, which is as it has always been.

We are always interested in hearing what you think about our work, so please try out the new tools and let us know what you like and what we can do better.

MapKit saw a few improvements with this update, too. The biggest one is that we added the option to disallow comments from your site on the MapKit. You'll find that on the MapKit settings page. We also made it so that there aren't any popups when people want to add photos or videos to your map, and tweaked out a couple bugs that were reported.