Platial News and Neogeography

A Whole Blog of Tours

Platial member Veehikle has a blog called T3 Consortium's Scratchpad of Thoughts. So far he's using it for great mapping projects. The first one is a map of historic pubs in New England and the second one is America's best burgers. (I see some kind of theme starting here.)

Both maps are open for submissions, so go and give your favorite burger joint its rightful place on the map and if you see a pub missing, put it on there.

I love the way he's using the new flash version of the maps in his blog posts and I also like how he changed "Steal this map" to the more polite "Borrow this map."

I'm excited to see what he's going to map next.

Dunkin' Donuts Marathon Map

The Bostonist just announced a contest to map the most Dunkin' Donuts locations possible. The winner will get a $25 gift certificate. Make your map and link to it in the comments of the post to win.

Revolution in the Garden

Found a quite thoughtful essay about the radical early histories (often forgotten) of "Garden Cities".

It might seem peculiar to imagine the New Towns or Garden Cities as anything especially revolutionary: places like Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City, Stevenage or Hampstead Garden Suburb are assumed to be staid and dull, their radical history generally forgotten: for many, they might be just another satellite town or suburban outpost.However, these places have a hidden history, one which spans utopian socialism and Victorian philanthopy, Modernism and Medievalism and takes us as far afield as Frankfurt or Magnitogorsk. The very idea of a ‘Garden City’ might seem merely parochial or conservative, but as the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay once claimed, ‘garden centres must become the Jacobin clubs of the new revolution’.

This is a story that could start with Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto in 1848. Alongside a paean to the revolutionary possibilities created by the industrial city and a dismissal of what they call ‘rural idiocy’ is the demand for the progressive elimination of the antithesis between city and country. Or alternatively it could start with the plans for small, self-contained, electric-powered autonomous communities advocated by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. However we’ll begin instead with the work of Ebenezer Howard.

A while ago I plotted Kim Fern's Portland Radical History Tour as a map on Platial, seeing the congregation of activity in SW Portland was a surprise to me. I'm curious about similar Radical History Maps in relation to these Garden Cities.

A little searching around found me a book about the same Ebenezer Howard: Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community. One bit in the book's description really summarizes the scene, "Howard's garden city, he shows, joined together two very different types of late-nineteenth-century experimental communities, creating a tension never fully resolved. One approach, utopian and radical in nature, challenged conventional values; the other, the model industrial towns of "enlightened" capitalists, reinforceed them."

One last quote from Owen Hatherley, "Nonetheless, underlying all these ideas is a refusal to look at cities as they actually are, but instead as what they could be."

Cities are rich repositories of subjective secretive experience, but they can be made more expressive, more revealed, more honest.

(Via The Measures Taken.)

The Satellite Photo Game

I know there must be a bunch of these out there, but I ran across this one and figured I'd share it with you. The Satellite Photo Game Thread on Snopes.

When Google Maps first came out, we used to play a game (invented by my husband, Erik) where one person would zoom the map in close someplace and the other would have to figure out where it was by only dragging the map around. No zooming out. It was sort of like being lost somewhere without a map, driving around. You follow roads or rivers hoping to get to a town or a highway you can recognize.

Otep

There is a new tour map on MySpace. Heavy metal band Otep has one of the nicest taglines I've heard in a long time: Destroying Popular Culture, One Mind at a Time.

The lead singer, Otep Shamaya, is a so kick ass. She's the kind of woman I was looking for as a role model when I was 13. She gave a great interview about being the only out lesbian on the heavy metal scene, about her musical history, Ozzfest, child abuse, and her overreaching message: "Art Saves."

Otep on Wikipedia

The Poetic Travel Journal

Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) by Matsuo Bashō

This is a map of the route taken by Matsuo Bashō and his traveling companion Sora in 1689. They covered most of the route on foot and the book combines both prose and verse. Here is an excerpt from the prologue, translated into English.

"It was only toward the end of last autumn that I returned from rambling along the coast. I barely had time to sweep the cobwebs from my broken house on the River Sumida before the New Year, but no sooner had the spring mist begun to rise over the field than I wanted to be on the road again to cross the barrier-gate of Shirakawa in due time. The gods seem to have possessed my soul and turned it inside out, and the roadside images seemed to invite me from every corner, so that it was impossible for me to stay idle at home."

I learned about this bit of travel writing this morning from a blog post about the fact that a recently published edition of this book has caused pencil sales to jump in Japan. The book comes with tracing paper for copying the calligraphy as a sort of meditation.

I like pretty much everything about this story. I'm envious of anyone who can read and write Japanese. I love the image of commuters hunched over their tracing paper. Copying text is a much underrated task. In some ways rewriting a text by hand is the lazy cousin of memorization, but it also has its own particular advantages. It's more exercise. When you copy a text you learn a lot about the work from the errors you make--the places where your inattention drops a preposition or alters some punctuation.

I also love the connection of tracing a route with your feet, with words, with calligraphy. There is something about motion and thought that mingle so nicely. And lastly, I like the way this fits into thinking about neogeography. Personal geography is as old as humanity. It's only the tools and the new possibilites of form that they open up that are new.

Platial - Mmmm, Beefy

We never did a formal report on the status of Platial's migration.

The transfer was completed on Thursday, just after the previous blog post. Some may have noticed downtime of 0-4 hours depending on when nameservers throughout the Internet were updated.

We hope this didn't cause too many problems for folks, and if you notice any glitches, please feel free to email me directly at jake [at] platial.com.

--jake olsen

Platial Going for Some Heftier Hardware

We announced that this was in the works a few weeks ago, and the day has finally arrived. Platial is moving to its new servers. Big, plump, bulky new Valley servers. We'll be continually optimizing Platial to make it better and faster and our new hardware will go a long way to eliminating some slow-downs caused by traffic bottlenecks.

Pretty soon now we'll be taking the site down for a while. That means that your MapKits will temporarily be missing. don't panic. They'll be back better than ever very soon.

This kind of migration is a very big production. Hats off to Jake Olsen and Omar Ahmad who have been orchestrating this move. Wish us luck and we'll be back up just as fast as we can.

Tyrone Wells Tour on Platial

We just launched the flash version of MapKit last week and we're excited to see Tyrone Wells using it to map his current tour. You can see the map on his MySpace profile and on Platial. Tyrone is a very talented young singer-songwriter. He started out playing acoustic in cafes a few years ago. Now he's just released his first major-label album, Hold On, after signing a deal with Universal Records.

If you're a fan of Tyrone Wells, leave a comment on the map to encourage him while he's on tour. If you're going to one of the shows, leave a comment to show your support.

Tyrone Wells Official Site
Campus Circle write-up of Tyrone Wells
Listen to some tracks and read a good review on CDBaby
SB Independent Review

More Glamorous MapKits

LA Brain Terrain, a blog, "for Angelenos interested in more than just driving, flirting and (net)working!" has two maps on Platial. One showing Las Angeles bookstores and another showing cinema-realted sites.

The author of Red Enclave has mapped her travels. She's a very good writer. This one definitely merits a little detour.

One of my neighbors in Ashmont has started a map for his local blog. lost of good stuff there, too.

The Fish That Saved New Orleans, Summer 2007 is a blog about a trip to help rebuild New Orleans. They have a map of their adventure.

KB6NU has published a map on his ham radio blog. He describes it as "a map of the 15 80m contacts I’ve made with my 80m random wire antenna." Very cool!

It's Probably Just Me has a great example of your basic autobiogeography.

Kings Cross Environment has a great map of Places to eat and drink in Kings Cross.

Aylesham & Snowdown Welfare Bowls Club has a map showing all the bowling clubs in Kent.

Songs in my Head is a Christian blog about music and faith. Its author Erika invites her readers to leave a mark on her map.

I'm not exactly sure what Tipiqueos is about, but there's a map there open for additions.

100% CHILENO has mapped a couple Places in Puro.

Where the Bloggers Are
A lot of bloggers just like the show where they live.

Jason Perry
Marco Papale
Comentarii si analize

Guest Book Maps
Check in and leave your mark.

Die Kanzlei bei der Hedinger Kirche
“Coisas…”