The English Cemetery

Maps.ask.com , a new contendant in the Ajaxian maps competition. It comes after Google Maps and Virtual Earth, and they have no API for the moment, but the roadmaps and streetplans for much of Europe are clearly superior.

Now this place I am now, Eibar, has drag-and-zoom maps:

Several eastern European countries covered as well:

In Russia, St. Petersburg and Moscow have streetplans!

The satellite views are not as detailed as in Google, but, they reach the level of resolution that Google has in many areas of lower resolution. As a matter of fact, they share imagery. Compare this and this , same clouds over the Basque coast.

I saw Brokeback Mountain this weekend. In the first part of the movie, there's a character named Joe Aguirre. We may think that he's a former shepherd that has prospered to become a herd owner.

I knew one Joe Aguirre, Basque shepherd in the US. Not in Wyoming, but in Idaho. He was a natural of Mallabia, the birthplace of my mother. My mother also grew among sheep: as a child, she usually watched after the herd, she told me that she new sheep by their faces, and that each one had a name for her. I suppose that Jose Agirre from Mallabia had also experience with sheep or cattle before embarking to the US. It is very possible that there he would be called Joe, as other emigrants named Jesus became Jess in the US.

Jose Agirre eventually left Idaho, and came back to the Basque Country. He was employed at my hometown Eibar, and afterwork, he earned some extra money teaching english. I was one of his pupils, that attended his lessons at his home.

Joe Aguirre from Brokeback Mountain is the bad guy in the film. The Jose Agirre that I know was a good man, though I don't know what he thinked about homosexuals.

Brokeback Mountain is a touching movie, a good one, about truth, love, being a man... I liked it very much. It isn't a movie about sheep or Basque immigration, certainly. But, well, I just recalled Jose Agirre watching it, and I suppose that if I have a blog in English right now, I owe it to him as well.

And regarding sheepherding in Wyoming... in 2005 a documentary was released, The Last Link, a feature about Pete Camino, a Basque shepherd born in Buffalo, Wyoming.

Someone asked privately, why Polish for Tagzania ? Well, we're neither in Poland nor master too much Polish, actually. We are in the Basque Country, far from Poland, really.

But, some boys from a tech institute in Rzeszow have come to a local tech institute here (student exchange), and this Basque school has put the 18-year boys practising at companies around. There was one of this young poles with Internet skills, so the local institute sent him to us . This young man, Karol Palys, came just perfect for us, to test the l10n of the tool in some non Latin-1 encoding language...

And there it is. Karol will go back to Poland this week. You may contact him at the ZSE tech institute Rzeszow and at rahrahim at op.pl by email.

Don't know if Polish users will see any interest in our tool.... Word of mouth is our only way to get out. Our content at Tagzania is open, and the translations as well. The polish one is already public here.

A big step for Tagzania today. We are multilingual from now on.

Four languages as a beginning. English, Spanish, Polish and Basque. Go to the settings page, and choose your interface language. We have currently published the translations, the .po files, at Tumatxa. We hope to add new language versions, with the help of users. A mailing list (information - archive) has been set up, and we hope to develop a closer relationship with users of all over the world through that.

• List info
• The archives (also there to subscribe)

There are more settings available as well. Measurements, distance between locations, are now shown in the units of your choice, metric (kilometers) or anglo-american (miles).

We have also created a page to show our gratefulness to some propagandists of Tagzania. Users that have tested our tool, promoted it in their website, provided ideas and valuable feedback... There have been many of them, but, well, the Supreme Council of Tagzania, applying esoteric designation procedures, has designated just a handful of them as ambassadors, and there they are, at our Diplomatic Service page and a map specially dedicated to these people. Tagzania is proud of you!

This fascinating japanese blog, Naobasque, written from the Basque Country! Right now he has a post about the Basque flag, and the author comments some wikipedia entries about the Basque Country!

I would like so much to leave a comment there... but I cannot. Google's translation service (BETA), tells me that in Naobasque's comment dialog box there is a field for password and I cannot guess which one it is... And the trackback feature is only for registered users (and that's a barrier I cannot trespass). No trace of an email that I can detect as well.

Will pingback or some Technorati-like tool make him aware of me?

Naobasque! Hear my desperare cry! I want to contact you by email!

Please sign the petition for Public Geographical Data and against Inspire.

INSPIRE is a UE Directive on European "spatial data infrastructure" and it just began its second reading in the European Parliament. Read in a mailing list: Within a few weeks or months it may entrench a policy of charging European citizens to access public information they've already paid to collect.

Europeans need open data. Open maps, open postal address geocoding.

Doing our bit, I just signed, and contributed with translations into Basque and Spanish.

The Winter Olympics event was used by Google to bring roadmaps to continental Europe: to the Piedmont region around Torino as a beginning. Probably they'll expand to the whole of Italy, and perhaps to coincide with the Football World Cup, to Germany and other countries (France and Spain, I would predict, after reading comments on this screen capture ).

Mashups and geo-social-sites were fast to use the novelty, to publish Torino-related maps. So we did at Tagzania, and rival site Platial noted it on their blog. They're elegant, at Platial, mentioning us, and maintaining a creative website. Tagzania seems to have more traffic (according to Alexa), but I suppose that Platial are better located (on the west coast of the US), have better connections (Tim O'Reilly on their board) and now they have money.

The Platial-blogger mentions the great advantages that detailed mapping brings for place-bookmarking or geo-tagging. Or, to put the other way, the chances you have to wrongly locate a given place.

Certainly streetplans and roadmaps increase the chance to bookmark locations, but even without that or hi-resolution imagery, wherever users are active, an interesting amount of locative information can be added. Tagzania's been sort of popular around our home base, so a city like Donostia, with no imagery of quality, looks quite well mapped

BTW, Tagzania's home page looks different today. We've changed the text-only delicious-like interface that we had since July 2005, and will include now an example map. We've added another Bitakora-based blog to Tagzania, as well. Maps to be displayed as examples, will be permalinked in that blog.

The first users of the blogging software that we released, Bitakora, are on the FFF categories: Friends, Family, Fools... I suppose that's what has to be expected. But, at least we, and some friends around, are using this new tool happily. There's the first english Bitakora of the planet, as the newsroom for Tagzania. Also a Bitakora-based site for a Spanish opinion-writer, Javier Ortiz and the first open Bitakora website: Blogak.com , sort of Blogger in Basque, a platform to create a blog in 3 easy steps., which we launched yesterday.

FON reaches the US, and now has maps for that country created by the Tagzania crew, altogether with coleagues of another Basque company, Alianzo.

FON is a start-up created by serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky.

The idea is a long-tail-like connectivity network. Wi-fi access points that users provide thru their wi-fi routers, each one re-distributing their broadband share from their particular source. You enter the network, share your broadband around your home, but get your share returned when you approach other people's windows. Others, not members of the network, may get cheap broadband paying for a connection if they happen to be around those points, and the network members may get benefits from that as well.

Any area of great Google Earth resolution that has no counterpart in Google Maps, has now been updated: at Google Local, but not thru the API.

Examples at the Hierro island, in the Canary Islands, off the coast of western Africa. Looks cloudy at Tagzania, and as a matter of fact, those are the very same clouds appearing at Virtual Earth or Windows Live Local, the Microsoft counterpart to Google.

This happens in many places. Tallinn, for instance, in Estonia.

We're eager to see these things in the API, obviously. Streetplans will arrive hopefully. I guess Germany's map vistas will be earlier than the World Cup: just a guess.

Today my company CodeSyntax has released a new Zope blogging product.

It is called Bitakora or Bitakora Blog Community.

This is a product for managing multiblog communities. It is multilingual, with varios language versions right now (english, spanish, basque). Blogs managed thru this system are based on a tag-based archive. And other features, as well (ePoz based wysiwyg editor, pingback system...). There must be bugs, of course. This is the release 0.1.

We have created a mailing list for the product, as well.

Some screenshots here and the .po files and translations made so far also downladable.

Some days ago, The Spanish Royal Family published in their official website a Chritsmas picture so badly photoshopped that it would seem like a joke. They even offered apologies: no time to reunite all the grandchildren around Juan Carlos and Sofia, so they turned to copy & paste. Lots of work, for these parasites of public budget, it seems.

However, that kitsch collage has ignited a wave of mockery that feels like fresh air. The king of Spain has become Spain's ideal Moshzilla model for dozens of picture mash-ups.

Now, they've met online, as well.

That's a picture a friend sent me. Not yet in the pseudo-official Family gallery. Great artwork there. There's the Constant Plumber from Bloglines even, or a Basque motive.

My personal favorite is the Republican version.