Platial News and Neogeography

Shark Week

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The Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week cable TV event starts Sunday and is celebrating 20 years of gruesome success.

Years ago, my family shared a great loft space in Brooklyn with two of the Platial co-founders, Jason and Di-Ann. When the building was sold and we had to move out, we ended up selling a bunch of our furniture to some people somebody knew at the Discovery Channel, who were looking for props. They wanted basically to get some sharks to bite some furniture so people could see how it looks. I don't know if they ever went through with their plan, but it sure makes a good story.

In honor of the TV event, I'm posting again about a map that has been around for some time, the Shark Attack Map. It lists all the fatal shark attacks since the year 2000, plus pretty much every shark bite from the past year or so. Every time someone gets bitten by a shark, the map gets updated, so you can see the most recent attacks.

Map Bounds Bug: I Can Fix it for You

Recently we discovered a new bug. Several people reported it on our forum. If a Place is added to a map outside the area you want the map to include and then you delete that place, the site fails to recompute the map bounds. That means that the map stays zoomed out too far, spoiling the display of your markers.

We are working on a fix, but if you have a map which is looking a little wonky because of this bug, I can fix it for you right away.

You can leave a note on the forum if you want me to fix your map, or email me tracy-at-platial(dot)com. Be sure to tell me the url of your map.

Platial, Professional Couch Surfers

Heya Platial... We've been wondering how we are going to build a truly global resource when our travel has been reduced to the Alaska Airlines commuter shuttle between Portland and San Jose, CA.

So, we're going on the road for the whole month of August!  Some of our new work will best be done in collaboration with other engineers around the world. So far we haven't been able to find affordable accommodation for our tribe of 10 + 4 kids= 14 neogeographers in India (non monsoon areas) or Turkey (our first two choices for various reasons)  for the month of August. So, now we're  looking for ideas from you. Where can we go that will still allow us to conserve money? Know of any houses big enough for all of us, pretty close to a city, kid friendly, engineer friendly anywhere in the world where we can develop some new work? A perk would be close to any swimming :), garden or any other environment which will remind us that it is summer back in Portland. Got a farm or any other reason to have enough space for all of us? We're great cooks, handy around the house and can make maps like nobody's business. We'd love to work on a WhereCamp wherever we end up as well!

Open to any and all ideas! Want to keep it private? You can email me at diann-at-platialdotcom

Thanks so much! Hope to see you on the road.

btw- This is us and the people who've helped us along the way.

NYC Kitesurfers

One of the members of the NYC Kitesurfers Yahoo Group has gone to a lot of trouble to put together a great Platial map called Kiteboarding Spots for his community.

One thing that always amazed me when I lived in New York was the fact that I could so easily forget how close I was to the shore. If it weren't for the seagulls a person might completely forget that she was living in a port city. But not these folks. If you know some of these kiteboarding spots, be sure to comment or leave a picture. The map is open, too, so if you see that a great location has been left out, be sure to add it.

Here are a few NY Kitesurfing videos I found on Youtube
Gligo Beach
Shelter Island
Fire Island

Mandy Moore Fan Map on Platial

Mandy Moore is the newest star to put a Platial map out there. She's asking her fans to log in and add their favorite pictures to her map. You can see it on her Myspace page, Xanga page, or on My Yearbook.

Mandy Moore's new album Wild Hope is out in stores today. Check out her official website for more information about the new record.

GPS Navigation - from shelf to dashboard

There is a fascinating article on GPSreview.net that compares the expectations people have of in car navigation systems before they use one, and after. The one incredible insight/discovery is here

What I was most amazed about was how quickly their expectations of the device went from pure amazement of the moving map and being bewildered by the fact that the GPS has side streets to disappointment that not every POI was in the database and road changes just completed a few months before were not yet in the database.

Remapping LA

Remapping LA is a really interesting project.

"The purpose of Remapping LA is to understand what is going on socially and culturally in this location," said Jeff Burke, executive director of REMAP. "We want to provide a resource for local communities and other citizens so that they can explore first the history of the [Los Angeles State Historic Park] site, and then the communities surrounding it and the geography of L.A., in every sense of the word." (quote via UCLA News)

In its first phase, UCLA students are out gathering data. They will use this data to create a virtual guidebook, and in the last phase turn the tools over to the people living in the communities.

(via Geomancers. I may not make it to many meetings, but I do read the emails!)

KML and the Open Geospatial Consortium

Google has offered up KML 2.1 ( the current version) into the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards process as, "the HTML for the geospatial web." This blog post by Paul Ramsey has a good outline of the announcement.

feed 43

A while back, our number-one power user Baostar started mapping some things using our feed mapper tool. He discovered that some of the stuff he wanted to map didn't have feeds, so he started using feed 43. This service can convert content from any site into an rss feed. Pretty cool.

England Rocks

England Rocks is a really fun cross between a history book and a juke box. They've taken a google map and plotted all kinds of fun UK music history, venue locations, and music festival information. It's fun to browse, and easy to use.