Platial News and Neogeography

Tourmapper is on the Fritz

The Tourmapper, which makes maps from the upcoming shows lists on MySpace Music pages, is not working right now. MySpace has made a few changes to the way they handle the tours, inadvertently breaking our little widget. We're working on making the changes we need to make in order to get the Tourmapper working again.

Best Practices for Emitting KML and Giving Props to the Geoweb's Authors

KML, originally designed as an external format for Keyhole's geographic data, has become, by evolution and design, a leading interchange format in the emerging "geoweb" as the WWW-embedded global repository of geographic information has come to be known. Supporting this direction, the OGC is working to bring KML into its standardization process.

KML, having been repurposed, does not arrive already perfected for its role as a geoweb underpinning, and the members of the geoweb community have not yet evolved the range of practices needed for smooth functioning of the new ecosystem.

Here is an important example. When KML content from Platial started showing up in Google Maps search results recently (under "user-created content"), we noticed a lack of attribution. Places added by our users ended up on Google pages without any information about where the content came from. Of course, this needed fixing: attribution is essential in any domain relying on user-contributed content. That is, people won't contribute without it for long. KML, unlike RSS (and GeoRSS), does not come with built in tags that point back to information sources, so KML emitters, such as ourselves, don't immediately think to include this attribution information.

Last week we had a visit from a few Googlers (John Hanke and Chikai Ohazama from Keyhole/Earth and Brandon Badger from the maps API team), and the attribution issue was one of the topics we talked about. The most direct fix is for emitters to include attribution links "by hand" in the content they emit - in particular, in the description and Snippet tags of the Placemarks. But it is also worth considering extensions to the KML standard for support of attribution. We have implemented the former fix in our own KML emitter (example), and have general ideas about how KML should be extended.

Here are some suggestions:

• Platial, and other KML emitters can and should:
  • Give linked attribution to the author right at the top of the description and snippet, including the author's avatar;
  • Include a link in the description back to the original post;
  • Include a link in the description back to the context in which the post was found;
• KML needs recontextualization into its new role in the geoweb, where connecting content of diverse forms and sources is as important as representation of geography:
  • Add tags (analagous to the link tags in the RSS channel and item elements) that link out from the geographic content within KML to other content on the web. Attribution is one application, but there are others. Such tags should be supported at root and folder as well as atomic feature levels. For example, a KML feed for a newspaper's dining column will need to point back in some manner to the source of the information, and this is an attribute of the whole feed, not just individual reviews (encoded as Placemarks).
  • In the meantime, the Metadata can be used as a stopgap. For example, here is a possible (dead simple) structure for attribution metadata:

      <Metadata>
        <authorLink> ... </authorLink>
        <sourceLink>...</sourceLink>
      </Metadata>
    

    Metadata can be attached to folders as well as atomic features.

In closing, authors deserve proper attribution. This is a call out to Google, the OGC and everyone who uses KML to build a healthy ecosystem for the contributors to the geoweb.

--Chris Goad, chris [at] platial.com

Platial FlashKit

Today, Platial released the Flash version of our MapKit, cleverly dubbed FlashKit :) FlashKit is not as robust as our javascript application but it's good fun and now increases the universe of MapKitters by about, um, 500 million!  Everyone has been clammering for a Flash version so here you go, please give feedback. We hope you like the dynamic image bar which shows the images from your map.

Also, you'll notice a new option on MapKit settings, Steal This Map which allows anyone to grab your map for their own site and continue to add to it. So if you have a thriving community map for sailing, hiking, buiking, kid-friendly places- whatever - you can get more places on your map and build bigger influence among your peers.

 

In case your wondering why we use the term steal when we respect copyright? It's a tribute of course to a great inspiration. And we think it's an important one. My friend Caterina always talks about the culture of generosity and we think it's a very important time for generous geography. I'm not sure why we had to use the ski mask guy but ok. Astronauts and ski masks, why not?

Here's an example here of a FlashKit map.

ADD PLACES TO THIS MAP or GET YOUR OWN MAPKIT

STEAL THIS MAP

Also good news for all you Friendster and Blogger.com users! It's easier than ever to publish to those services! And Wordpress and Typepad users, we have new stuff up our sleeves for you too!

Oh and speaking of attribution- we're fixing the obscured Yahoo! logo right now!

Platial Summit 2007

Here are photos from our Summit last week. Three fun filled days of architecting our contribution to the geospatial web. The entire Platial team (only 9 of us but we rarely get to see each other in person) and investors, advisors and others. Mike Liebhold kicked it off with some far out future thinking in IFTF style, followed by partners, friends and pundits. Clay even managed to make it to town! Thanks so much to everyone for participating. Times like that for a small start-up feel momentous. Next time, we'll even get to see Baostar I hope. I'll let Bao and Tracy tell that story.

The road ahead is very exciting. For the first time we have a one year plan- a whole year. I wish we could build it all in three weeks. The thought of an entire year makes me antsy because patience is not my strength.  Coincidentally, Google released MyMaps and KML search the day of our board meeting and summit kick-off. (Do you think they were so excited about our summit they thought they should release something relevant? Good on 'em :) ). The most interesting part of their release for us is kml search. There is a ton of momentum toward building the geoweb and seeing enormous amounts of stories, images and video about places being shared freely with people around the world.

The KML search launch helps underscore the complex economy of mashups, information, collaboration and attribution.  KML structures assume a tidy single entity for a piece of content, for example, attribution for Platial as a source. However, we aggregate 36MM geobits form Flickr, Youtube, Yahoo! Local, Wikipedia, geonames and others so we want to make sure each is properly attributed. To add to this complexity,  we have thousands of users who painstakingly craft amazing local guides and community maps and we want them to be recognized whether their work is on Platial, Flickr or anywhere else. Going even further, we want their work recognized on their OWN sites and blogs. So many bloggers use us as a resource for themselves and their communities- we want to give back how we can and right now thats traffic and attribution. How can we collectively build up a high search rank as a distributed network? So, there is a great conversation brewing about all of this. We appreciate very much the fact that Google is engaged in this conversation and taking these issues seriously (I'm personally very impressed - they're kind of defying all of those nasty rumours. Jason and Tracy are being necessarily vocal on the attribution issues.). A couple of the Google guys have imparted helpful wisdom to us about kml this week and Jason is working feverishly to pull it all together for you.

We're happy that we have georss and kml to draw from and give back to as we we all work toward weaving a navigable and useful experience for people around the world for this geostuff (Which was formerly hard to get, commercially skewed and politically biased. It's going to be a fun, hard year. We're working to make this all relevant to your community - relevant to you. So let us know how! Thanks for all your comments last  week and feature requests too. This is the time!

We're a Webby Honoree

We were notified today that we've been recognized as a Webby Honoree in the category Guides/Ratings/Reviews. Only five sites are chosen as Nominees and ten as Honorees. We're very honored to be recognized, and we're happy to share this honor with all of the people who use Platial and make it what it is. Thank you, Platial MapMakers!

User-Created Geodata. Respect.

Update
We spoke to John Hanke and two Google developers about the issue of authorship and attribution. The best way for links back to the proper contexts to happen is for us to make sure we include those links in the kml we emit, which we are going to set up as quickly as possible.

We were also told that they have plans to begin supporting georss in addition to kml, which is great news. Adding user-created data into local search is fantastic and Google seems sincere in its desire to find the right way of crediting authors.

Another great thing that came out of the meeting was a discussion about featuring some of Platial users' best content in Google Earth. We'll tell you more about that as we move ahead.

******

The new Google geo-search tool pulling in user-created content is very cool. I was pretty disappointed, though, to notice that they aren't giving the users who created the data links back to their information in context.

So if you search for a restaurant in Irvine, you're sure to find one of Baostar's great reviews, but you'll get no link to his restaurant map. It's like showing a blog post in a list of search results without linking back to the blog. I wonder if this is a temporary oversight or if it's a lack of understanding on the part of Google of what user-created geodata really is. After a year of admiring what our users have been doing, we know that these are not just points on the map. These are rich posts connected to places, whose authors deserve to be respected.

We are in touch with Google to make sure they understand this issue. Authors unite!

Platial On MyMaps

This morning Google launched MyMaps and with typical blogospheric drama (which I adore) predictions of the fall of mash-ups were made. Here's my take...

This kind of disruption was inevitable.
There is a rapidly growing geospatial web and they have in many ways elevated the importance of it.

While no entrepreneur is excited about potentially competing with Google, it had to happen. This is an indicator of something very interesting in new kinds of collaborative business models. For example; apis in and out and remixing. There are a number of friend/foe  relationships that spring up when you have alliances and markets with rapidly evolving needs. Our business will be disrupted too in some ways but it was time.

We needed a new conversation to get us beyond the limiting concept of mash-ups. A year ago many of our services looked the same but now you see differentiation start to emerge. As well Google has (for now) carved a small/clear piece of this and hasn't entered into the community aspects. For now, we need to count ourselves among the Google friend/foes which are rapidly increasing!

They haven't (yet) touched the core of our business model, audience or product path. So, here we go onward (but faster and better). :)