The English Cemetery

The 3D Warehouse where Google publishes 3D models for Sketchup and Google Earth created by the community has its interface redesigned in August. Basically, they added a Google Map with the location of models downloadable as Google Earth KMZ.

I sent them this suggestion, adding Google Maps to their interface, the very day the Warehouse opened, back in April. I posted that in their forum (also opened that day), but my post has disappeared... hummm :-( ... However, I did post about that in my Spanish-language blog and uploaded the interface suggestion to Amy Flickr account.

One of the big announcements that Google reserved for the Where 2.0 Conference, the availability of free Google-based geocoding , not only for the US, but for Spain, France, Italy and Germany, is having immediate effects. The most obvious, to me, is that this will boost continental real-estate mashups.

Look at this beta, http://www.revoluz.com/ made by the people of Panoramio (I was happy to met with them at Where 2.0) using Loquo.com data. Ubaldo Huerta, Loquo's master, helped them including the addresses in the feeds from Loquo, so Revoluz becomes the most similar European thing to the famous Housingmaps, which combining Craigslist (and Loquo is the Spanish Craigslist, bought by eBay last year) and Google Maps, was the first big mashup that deserved that name. So, any other can easily do the same, no screen scratching needed. Most addresses are not explicit enough for precise geocoding, but Loquo's big asset is visible price, so uncommon in Spain, where most agents don't mention the price of a house.

Another one, an Italian example: http://www.maiom.com/mappa.

Now that we see this in Continental Europe, the absence of UK geocoding in Google's offer becomes more obvious. I heard some English people at Where 2.0 and the Google Geo Developed Day that they felt like being 3rd World following the geocoding announcement...

However, the real-estate mashup environement is more active in the UK, despite expensive geocoding. There's a more advanced Internet and entrepreneurial culture there, both for customers to use the net to search homes, and better ground for start-ups to blossom. And this is the result of that:



The latest brittish real-estate website that I have noticed is Nestoria. Its look and feel resembles Trulia, that great US site. Very professional, apparently tied to the geo-hacker community... The continental mashups quite far from that level.

I'm at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose. We come to see how things move around here... There are many similar sites to Tagzania, and we wanted to test the atmosphere. One of the contenders that has risen in the realm of social apps is the New Zealand company named Projectx Technology who have launched Zoomin.co.nz and Zoomin.com.au in NZ and Australia.
 
One of the features of Zoomin is the nice URLs they get. Check this in Australia:
 
 http://zoomin.com.au/australia/wa/perth/east+perth/hay+street/310/
 
Postal addressess equal URLs. Nice concept. Now they've extended it to the US with a thing named Zopto, and beginning with California they have things like:
 
 http://preview.zopto.com/ca/orange/irvine/boise/
 
 http://preview.zopto.com/ca/san+francisco/san+francisco/market+street/10/
 
Well, we just made for a customer a very similar thing. Independent from Tagzania, fully, and we just didn't have any say in the main GIS at B5m, the mapping app of a Basque region, but we did manage to create a very nice postal directory: one URL per every address in the region of Gipuzkoa, in the Basque Country, a relatively small area of 0.5 million people, where there are 80.000 final web addresses.
 
 So, this is the home level:
 
http://b5m.gipuzkoa.net/kaletegia
 
 and this is a certain city, with its street list:
 
 http://b5m.gipuzkoa.net/kaletegia/tolosa and let's jump to streets beggining with S...  
 
We choose a street, Urkizu Auzoa:
 
 http://b5m.gipuzkoa.net/kaletegia/tolosa/urkizu_auzoa
 
There it is, the list of buildings there, also arrangable by house names, as this happens to be a rural area with traditional households.

And, of course, the final address of any given house has its URL:

http://b5m.gipuzkoa.net/kaletegia/eibar/bidebarrieta/042

Not only works with postal addresses, but with rivers, mountains, and other elements, as roads, and exact kilometer points in roads:

http://b5m.gipuzkoa.net/kaletegia/errepidea/n-634/

http://b5m.gipuzkoa.net/kaletegia/errepidea/n-634/31
 
A couple of screenshots: one from a street, and the other one, a whole kilometer in road N-634

Next monday I'll visit the Googleplex. With my friend and coleague Josu Azpillaga, as part of the Tagzania team, we will attend the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, California (tue, wed). But on Monday, there's a related event, organised by Google itself, the Geo Developer Day. This is the schedule:

11:00-12:00 Registration

11:45 - 1:00 Lunch

1:00 - 2:30. Launch. Google says: We've got a few things up our sleeve, and you'll be the first to see.

2:30 - 3:30. Showcase Session. A gallery of great Maps API Mashups and Earth KML presented by Mike Pegg of Google Maps Mania (where I sometimes write as a correspondent) and Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog.

3:30 - 5:00. Breakout Sessions. Dig deeper on development issues specific to Maps, Earth, or SketchUp.

5:00 - 7:30. Poster Session, Ping Pong, and Patio Dinner. We proposed Tagzania to be in a poster... Perhaps we'll see a screenshot attached there...

That's at Google Headquarters. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043

Of course, this is a return visit for the previous one the Google team payed to the CodeSyntax headquarters, in Pol. Azitain, Eibar, E-20600 ;-)

The hybernation ended. The Cemetery is back. 

Thee layout and software have changed. No more Coreblog, but Bitakora. No images of Donostia or the location of the Cemetery... Just some anonymous partying girls now. It has nothing to do with the Cemetery or with myself, but well, it's just something I liked. The old layout has been buried in Flickr.

No more trackbacks, perhaps pingbacks, but not sure. As for comments, they will pass the captcha checking to block non-human entities. Old comments and permalinks have been preserved. There were no categories or blog sections previously, now I have tags as an organising principle. The RSS feed has a new location, but I hope that the re-direct trick intended for Bloglines works, so subscribers don't have to make any changes.

Now, the two blogs, the one in Basque and English are not the same instance, truly. So, I am little more apart from the path to multilingual blog perfection that I wrote once: the Ten Commandments for bilingual blogs. Moreover, someone may remeber that this began as a trilingual blog, but in october 2005, the Spanish side moved to the Mapamovil.net

Until I find a way to stop spam, I will not post anymore here at the Cemetery. I need to figure some way to introduce a captcha system.

Right now, the top searched item in Technorati, a Basque term: ETA. The ceasefire came. It was very much needed.

This morning I just thought about the joke that we chose to define Tagzania's blog: Conspiring for world domination from the Basque Country. Tagging the planet to set up our targets.

Basque politics are so boring, complicated, ugly... World domination is like a scapegoat. A wider playfround, with fresh air.

First came Google Moon, Then, this week, Mars and Europa, not to be confused with Europe ;-)

But I think that the big one is not yet with us, Google Celestial Sphere

The skies by night, northern and southern hemisphere, stars and costellations... It can be managed with lat/lon and image tiles, just as Google Maps.

And when the API is created for that... We'll have Tagzania Space! I think that it may make sense, to have personal/social bookmarks and tags over the skies. So much amateur astronomy and instituions out there, all very much conected to the web. A new extra-solar planet here, a supernova there, predicted position of comet X for tomorrow night, Star Trek interest points... Much more to tag in the universe than in Mars alone.

Ilustration below, the one and only (as far as I know) Basque placename in Mars, Galdakao:

Formula One season for 2006 begins on sunday, March 12. All circuits, with race dates, at this Tagzania F1 2006 map. We have doubts about the location of the Istanbul Park speedway, anyway. It's new, and apparently not showing in satellite imagery, but... The Grand Prix of Turkey is on August, so we may well figured it out by that time.

There's now search in Tagzania. Partnering with Geonames, what a great service.

The data at Geonames can be incredibly precise. You can search for features with great detail. Search for General Sherman, and you get the position of the General Sherman Tree, a giant sequoia in California, the biggest living being on Earth.

Satellite imagery at that point doesn't let us indicate if that individual tree is really there, but we assume they're right. http://www.tagzania.com/near/36.58083/-118.75/

However, there's an option to correct data on Geonames itself, through a direct link, and if you do so, subsequent searches show corrected results.

Also, search and Near URLs can be constructed now by third parties, if anyone is interested in linking their apps or sites with Tagzania. The search URL is like the one at Technorati:

• www.tagzania.com/search/balaklava

And the Near URL can be constructed with the following logic: www.tagzania.com/near/lat/lon/ with latitude and longitude given in decimal numbers. For instance:

• www.tagzania.com/near/51.45/-0.05/ shows locations around London.