Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

Agenda:

• http://platial.com
• A brief survey of some of its uses
  • http://www.mikeanddominic.com – bars they’ve been thrown out of. uses iframes to show map on their site, tho map is hosted at platial. if you click on the map it takes you to platial, where you can see more info.
  • safari is not the optimal platial browser
  • Bill’s site – real estate bubble map. http://realestatecafe.blogs.com/real_estate_bubble
  • guy who is cycling every route ever done on tour de france. http://will-davies.com/. will himself changed the code so he has the whole site in his website…. danger there is that you can get lost looking at their site within his site
  • http://www.londonist.com – stalking charles holden as ex. they profiule an architect or artist and then create a map of all that person’s related spaces around london. they are trying to map a graffiti artist’s work, for example, by having their users map it (their being londonist)
  • myspace profile with a map of all the places a person’s beein in america. myspace doesn’t allow iframes so this girl uses yahoo – it’s a workaround platial developed for people without ability to use iframes. but limited to north america by yahoo. published as swf.
  • Piotr Roscoff – maps of his town
  • Tracy’s swimming map
  • nice to see people’s comments on the places you add to your maps
  • Shava – it’s narrative mapping
• More general stuff
  • 90% of people are looking for stuff – fewer are adding. So so far they aren’t focusing cos they need to get people to add places for there to be content there. Now however they have a lot more content, so they rebuilt their search last week.
  • madamegonzaga, a new user who has built a lot of maps recently. she’s a hungarian soothsayer living in san francisco so all her posts are in character. her map is of all the people she knows in SF. but it’s really a video blog – she interviews all these people and puts the interviews up on platial.
  • lots of freedom as to where to host the video.
  • how to make a map – register, login, add a place
  • you can add a place to a map
  • how does platial define a map. you need to create an object called a map, for it to read as a map. they are working to make this more intuitive.
  • lots of ways to add a map (geocoders – none are perfect)
    • by address
    • intersections, latitude and longitude of something
    • search tool using yahoo local that searches by place name/location. when you do this, it adds the place as if it has been added by “system.” you can then get this place claimed as if you had added it. you click on “grab” when looking at the place. it then makes you the original geographer. once a place has an original geographer, nobody else can be the original. (there is some ability to control tho anyway – you control what you add – your post, etc. but the place, when you add it, belongs to the community – at least once they implement upcoming changes)
    • you can click on maps to manually add a place, or to move to make it exact after looking thru geocoding
  • Tension between people who want platial to be “the wiki of place” and between people who are building maps and who strongly want to be the sole owners of their content. they aim for middle ground – both a picture of everything being said about a place, and an ability for each person who uses it to be able to control what is in their maps and what they want to say about them.
  • Being the original geographer of a place is good because once they add ad revenue, after you add 500 places you are eligible to join the coop and get a share of the revenue. ads based on local businesses, very specific.
  • they will not show ads on other peoples’ websites that use platial. if google adds ads to their maps, they may switch from google. (they explore alternates to google anyway, in case google ever turns off the api)
  • for places that are not well-mapped by google, they explore alternatives like allowing ppl to add their own (poss for eventually, not immediate)
  • Q: Bill: what about if someone adds a place to your map? do you get automatically notified or only if you are subbed to the rss feed? (tracy thinks yes, not sure as it may have been a recent development)
  • Q: what does the api do? Tracy: I’m not\ a developer so I can’t answer this well. Basics – you can have something that looks pretty much like platial. ex: you have a hot springs website. people are there on the community, you doubt they will migrate to platial just to do this. so you could build a platial for hot springs, and crossfeed so that your site’s entries show up on platial, and anything tagged hot spring on platial would show up on your site. etc.
  • Q: jack: can you expand on your definition of place. is it a location? your use isn’t exactly a location. half moon beach, that’s a location. but the whaling museum, that’s not a location per se. Tracy: and a hot dog stand at half moon beach is its own place. Jack: and not all places are fixed locations – the berkman center place now moves. what if there’s an existing place, and suddenly it has a new location? tracy: several. someone might comment on the old location’s place note and say, hey, this place is moved. but they don’t want to erase the history. you could move a marker, and maybe have a “previously” flag. some way to show that a “place” on the map is a former location, with linkage to the new location if there is one. (lots of semi-existential discussion on this, esp with example of berkman moving, and baker house also moving, etc.)
  • Q: any thought of making “areas” rather than “points”? tracy: yes, though lines from place to place will be first.
  • “most popular feature” – trying to create an algorithm that isn’t just about views to a place’s page but also about visitors, comments, etc.
  • Q: do the maps, and places, come up in google searches? tracy: not directly, but sometimes through searches on people whose maps then come up.
  • Q: any plan to make maps or places only viewable by authorized folks? tracy: yes. it’s a big request and a high priority for us. but we want to make sure that when we implement it, we implement it fully correctly.
  • Q: what if one wanted to structure around paid access to a map – a directory. tracy: other paid websites do do that now… would be poss when we have advertising
  • Q: users? tracy – very active users building maps, a few hundred. thousands though whoare users.
  • (Tracy profiles a few active users)
  • their big break in the press was when Annalee Newitz wrote about them in Wired (yay Annalee!)
  • Q: financial model? tracy: tiny round of startup funding from some large investors. new in that they have big investors who normally didn’t used to give small amounts for startup funds – they normally give much larger sums. funders include Omidyar network. Goal that someday eventually, you could do a tag search on platial and see places around the world that are similar to each other in other countries, use that to make connections, etc.
  • there is in-site emailing but not yet groups. length of email is limited – people can move to directly emailing their addresses if they choose to exchange them
  • brand new navigation, all 1-click to find your stuff
  • “your homebase”
  • alpha toy – new today near you. maps added nearby. eventful and other sites’ events nearby. photos and videos tagged with names of nearby cities.
  • Zachary: antyhing to indicate status/respect/credibility within platial community… you mkight then get a local badge after adding a certian number of places to a town. stuff added by a local might come up higher in a search for that area. In all social stuff in general we are only just now really stsrtingn to focus on those things. ie, rewarding a user with points to get special stuff like animated gifs or whatever.
  • google earth. all the maps have network links. you can use it to keep track of platial instead of rss.
  • ads – issue for businesses to be able to buy up all ads on their location to prevent a competitor… or who would want to buy ability to choose which ads could be placed there, or ads that were for businesses in noncompetitive fields.
  • Zach – gather’s tone of advertizing works nicely
  • Bill: would anyone be interested in using platial at dan gillmor’s unconference in a month -to create “the opposite of crime” maps.