Platial News and Neogeography

LOSS - League of Secessionist States

LOSS - League of Secessionist States: ""

LOSS is a way for micronations to work and act together. What these nations have in common is the voluntary nature of citizenship, which is unrecognized by the established (Macro-)nations. They have often been described as the future of nationhood; communities of like minded individuals who do not rely on an accident of birth or geography to define themselves as compatriots.

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One of the more interesting members of LOSS is Elgaland Vargaland

The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland [KREV] were proclaimed in 1992 and consist of all Border Territories: Geographical, Mental & Digital.

With effect from the 14th of March 1992, we are annexing and occupying the following territories:

i - All border territories between all countries on earth, and all areas (up to a width of 10 nautical miles) outside all countries’ territorial waters. We designate these territories our physical territory. These territories, usually called No Mans Land or Border Crossings, are in constant flux. They change everyday, and in reports from all over the world we notice that new territories appear (eg the North and South Korean border), dissappear ( the East and West German border in 1989) and reappear (the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian borders). We also observe nations’ fishing territories waxing and waning. There are frequent foreign violations at sea; vehicles with cargo, refugees, tourists, political and military manoeuvers; animals and fishes walk and swim freely, insects and birds buzz and sing. Theoretically/practically all past exisiting areas such as the borders between Texas and the USA, between England and Scotland or between Skåne (at the time belonging to Denmark) and Sweden are annexed by The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland.

ii - Mental and perceptive territories such as the Hypnagogue State (civil), the Escapistic Territory (civil) and the Virtual Room (digital).

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Come to the Free Geek Fair tomorrow!

UPDATE ...Touche! http://platial.com/post/50888 Free Geek is at   1731 Southeast 10th Avenue, Portland, OR, 97214

Admit it, even in Portland there is nothing more fun than the annual Free Geek fair.  Here's a taste- and also I'll be on a panel about the future of technology Free Geek style. So please come and heckle me, Brian Jamison from Open Sourcery and others!

Geek Fair is Free Geek's annual street fair celebrating our volunteers, staff, like-minded organizations, and reuse & recycling.

Music to cross-channel your capacitors to:
Loch Berlin - Punk / Experimental / Shoegaze @ 1pm The Scree - Rockin' awesome @ 2pm Tom Wunderlich - Folk / Acoustic @ 3pm Paper Cameras - New Wave / Garage / Punk @ 4:10pm 40 Hundred Thousand Locked Up Guns - Punk / Electro/ Indie @ 6pm

Extra exotic flavahs:

Geek Arena - Our annual game show of esoteric knowledge hosted by "The Dave" Haskins @ 2:40 and 3:40. Smashtacular - Hate techonology? So do we! But we love recycling. Take this opportunity to combine these feelings in an orgy of techno destruction! LAN Party - Backspace, the cool kids from Oldtown show off their high speed comptuers and games. Big screen vids Kazum! - Acrobalance and style mixed with feats of strength and more style! @ 5:20pm. Moe and Edweena's Magical Variety Show @ 5:10pm. Fashion show - Fashion divas have nothing on us, local designers are here to freek out with their geek out. @ 4:50pm Zoobomb mini bike mayhem - We've got the brains, they've got the brawn.  Let's make lots of funny. Jugglers - Watch as they amaze the kids, and join in as they play with the pins.  They're geeky jugglers, and they like to share. Food! - from Redwing Cafe, Veggielicious, burritos, and Staccato Gelato. Booths! - People's Food Co-Op, Scrap, Red and Black Cafe, Personal Telco, and more. Dunk Tank - It's hot. Help that nerd cool off. Bike-powered smoothies - People-powered and yummy. Comedy! - The bar will feed you beer from Full Sail and laughs from these fine folks. Starts @ 5pm. Tarot card readings - Need to communicate with a lost file? Connect with the spirits of term papers long gone? Linux clinic - Our geeks may be able to help you help yourself. Futurecast - a panel of industry professionals consider the future of technology, and its implications on society. Brian Jamison - Open Sourcery Founder and CEO Richard Seymour - The Man Behind the Curtin Di-Ann Eisnor - Platial Co-Founder with special nerderific mystery guest! Compact Disk toss - One part Ultimate frisbee, one part Disks of Tron. Hard Drive Shuffleboard - Who can most accuratly skid these massive quantities of data?

Cheap Dates in Philly

uwishunu is a great Philadelphia blog. In addition to covering the music scene, restaurants, sites, and insider hotspots, they have a really fun video podcast called Cheap Dates, "featuring the dashingly bearded Mark Schoneveld and his lovely fiance Audrey Smith." They have a map on Platial showing all of the cool places they have been in the course of making their show.

Platial Wins AO100 2007!

Thanks so much to the AO100 editorial team- this is a great honor.

From their release ...

Platial Selected by AlwaysOn as an AO100 Top Private Company Award Winner

Recognized for Leadership in Emerging Technology and Global Business Potential Portland, OR based Platial Inc, community platform that enables anyone to map anything has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the AO 100 Top Private Companies for 2007.  The fifth-annual elite AO100 list was compiled by the AlwaysOn editorial panel. In order to be eligible for the AO100 list, companies had to be peer-nominated, with AlwaysOn receiving more than 1,000 nominations from venture investors, investment bankers and other industry experts. Platial and the AO 100 Top Private Companies for 2007 will be honored at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit to be held July 31 – Aug 2, May 1-3, 2007, at Stanford University.  The Stanford Summit is a two-and-a-half-day executive gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and commercial trends affecting the global technology industries.  The idea behind the AO100 top private companies list is to identify the most promising entrepreneurial opportunities and investments in the global technology industry. A full list of all the AlwaysOn Top 100 Private Companies can be found on the AlwaysOn Web site at: http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/15899

And of course the biggest thanks go to our users, the most interesting group of people I have ever encountered.

Update III- End of Day

Things have been solid for the last several hours but I feel like launch day was a bit of a dud for us. We submitted our new static/simple mapplet and it will go into the directory tomorrow. Jason is busy making a Platial app that will allow anyone to turn their map into a mapplet! We're looking forward to some bigger better mapplet action tomorrow-because at the end of the day, it's just the first day :)

Fortunately for us, this is the last platform launch for a while and we can again inwardly focus. We're busy executing against our next generation community mapping platform with some Eastern European PhDs of our own! Coming September...

Update! Been There up again.

OK, it appears to be working so go ahead, see who's been to the same places you have and embed that map!! Thanks to Team Google Maps (for whatever they did). Go use Google Mapplets. The Popular Places mapplet will be up soon.

Mapplets, Platforms and Launches! Oh my...

I posted my paper on The Economics of Mashups a while back. It spoke about the exciting new world of platforms for small guys like us. But live from the field here is the downside, compound bugs and QA complexity (btw- the upside is far greater imho).

When you're building a new experimental app on a new experimental platform you have compound bug opportunities with the extra boost that you don't know whose bug it is. For example, we're very excited about Google's Mapplets launch and we even get to be one of the launch partners. We made two new apps that we're really excited about which take a little piece of Platial and let folks use it right from Google. The only problem is... They don't work this morning. They worked last night at 12:30 am but please don't try to use them now. Our servers may be slow, a query may be untuned, their time outs may be aggressive but either way we're having trouble communicating and the result is a horrendous user experience.

All the folks who created mapplets without data entry and kept things simple seem are fairing well. For us, user contribution is the most important thing in the world so we couldn't imagine deploying without that! We'll get it sorted out, I'm entirely confident but I wanted to share the new apps and some humble wisdom (frustration) from the mashup perspective. We noticed that the georss reader is also having trouble with their data entry portions (Thats a cool app too but dont try to use it just now).

We're excited about the apps you'll be able to use real soon:

Been There
Been there is our feature that lets you say where you've been on Platial and see who else has been there. Now through the mapplet you can enter places you've been, see who else has been there and embed your "Been There" map anywhere on the web.

And Popular Places Nearby
Our slider snazziness on any Google map so you can easily find popular places nearby.

rainbow over north america

Italy

I noticed a few new maps in Italy recently and figured it would be a good time to do a little round up. Thanks to these mappers for sharing their insider knowledge of Italy!

Alexfromitaly has a great map of Italy on his site, Blog From Italy, Life in the Living Museum. You can also read his book.

Firenze Shopping gives you locations and informations about some exciting upscale shops on the main drag of Firenze. Petershieh also has a map of Manhattan.

Italian Poker Rooms, by Petrax, gives contact numbers and locations of places to get into a poker game across Italy.

Italy by Jklmiller is a nice personal tour of the country.

Sleary just made a new map called Italia_V!, showing all her favorite spots across the country.

Panairjdde has been a member of Platial almost since the beginning. He built his two excellent maps, Churches of Rome and Roman Battles only a few months after our launch.

Books on Platial

We are getting ready to start working more advertising into Platial to help us pay the bills. We have had Google adsense running for some time now. Because we know that most of our users are big readers, we are experimenting next with Amazon books.

I know that nobody loves advertising, but it is the only way for us to continue to offer our product, as I'm sure everyone understands. Our goal is to integrate advertising that is pertinent, context-driven, and for products or services that are interesting to you. We are working on refining the quality of the ads that are served. If the map is about something in particular, we are working on sending that information to Amazon. Otherwise, the books that show up will be about the map's starting location.

We are very eager to hear feedback on this. Leave a comment here, send us a feedback email, or leave your thoughts on our public forum.