The Wall Street Journal has decided to insult Basque speakers. What a shame of an article. It's hard to be a minority language speaker, precisely when it's minoritised even in your own land... And yet, looks as if Spanish speakers are the ones being persecuted by Inquisition. No. It's Spanish Inquisition the one that in the 21st century decided to close the only Basque-language daily newspaper, based in false accusations. As false as all content in that article.

Of course, the journalist got collaboration from local idiots. "Euskera just isn't used in real life", says a member of the Basque Parliament. If you're reading this here, you may follow the links to my Basque blog, this public discussion about the Guggenheim Bilbao or the Wikipedia. I hope that proves that Basque is at least used in virtual life.



Besides, the news item in the web mentions a correction regarding that map. Spain's Basque Country, at its widest point, spans approximately 85 miles, or 136.8 kilometers. A map that accompanied a previous version of this article had an incorrect scale. I wonder what they showed previously. But masquarading the Basque Country's map as the Hoped-for Basque homeland shows the political intent of the report.

Not all Basque maps published by American media are so deceptive. This map below was published by the National Geographic Magazine in 1997. Well, that's Euskal Herria. And Euskal Herria means (not difficult to grasp) Basque Country = Pays Basque = País Vasco.

After TomTom buying Teleatlas in July, now Nokia buys Navteq. Well, who will buy OpenStreetMap next? They are a hot asset now. I heard that after comment #23 in this BoingBoing post, Miss Teen South Carolina joined them as well to map the US and improve the current state of mental mapping there (image source):



The world needs geography. There's the case of that other TV personality in the US who couldn't tell if the world's flat or not. These two recent gaffes reminded me of another pageant contest in Spain. The Russian ambassador in Spain was part of the jury (hard diplomatic mission, you see) and asked the girl to talk briefly about Russia.



Well, Russia is a country... full of marvelous people... and there's been some political, er, changes, lately, and cannot tell much more.

I had never been to a Barcamp event, so I was gladly surprised with the self-organising principles, networking opportunities and good atmosphere that I found at last week's Wherecamp, which I attended with my Tagzania coleague, Gari Araolaza.

I even dared to give a lightning talk of my own. Unlike the Ignite Talk at Where 2.0, which went quite well, I just couldn't adjust to the available 5 minutes, and it went 1 minute long. Sorry!!!

My talk was Historic Maps. Best viewed at this Flickr set, as the presentation was just a succession of screenshots, showing historic maps of the first ever Wherecamp event of history! Map applications that participants showed and discussed, centered on the spot where the unfoncerence was held, the Yahoo Campus in Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley. You can browse over those historic screenshots in Flickr; I've added descriptions and links in the descriptions.

Just to illustrate this post with a couple of mashup maps of the event.



This one at Mapufacture created by Andrew Turner, that aggregates several Wherecamp created geoRss feeds (including one from Tagzania and plotted using Mapstraction's options, in this case, to show in in the 3d visualization of FreeEarth created by Poly9. Wow! FreeEarth can't now show very close details of their 3d model of the Worlds, due to lack of free detailed close imagery, but somehow the Poly9 has ways to overcome that shortage:

1. getting Mike Liebhold actually build 3D structures,
   
2. join the forces of the free market act, and let real estate developers construct things, as they have done with the moon's 3D equivalent of FreeEarth, the Moonplex.

And my own mashup:



I went to the Yahoo Campus at Tagzania, clicked on the Here tab to say I was there at that moment, and a message was sent to Twitter, including the code snippet with L: that would that tweet to appear in the exact spot of Twittervision.

Finnally, another joke, the extension that I made over Kyle Mulka's interesting new application, Cartiki, where plans and images can be uplodaded to make for detailed maps, as the exact spots where Wherecamp sessions were held.



Instead of Geotude's micromapping solution based in square units, Cartiki's approach is using a long long long breadcrumb that may come down to the tinyest detail!

A nice web application that we developed for the regional administration is now available in English. The Street Gazetteer of Gipuzkoa, is a directory-like organization of all postal addresses of Gipuzkoa (a Basque province inhabited by half a million people) plus other geographic features as mountains, rivers, roads... all geocoded to their exact locations.

As a matter of fact, each postal address of Gipuzkoa, each home in Donostia or any other town, has its own Permalink. I live in Heriz 47, Donostia for instance. Even every kilometer point of a given road.

I think rumours about the death of sites like Tagzania, the geo-mashups, have been greatly exaggerated. That's the tone of several posts commenting on the irruption of My Maps in Google, but I see G My Maps as a positive move towards a wider adoption of the concept of “personal geography”, which I think is an idea not very much extended among mainstream Internet users, and I see opportunities there for Tagzania, one of those social mapping apps.

It’s also interesting to see Google catching up with concepts that we had clear when we launched Tagzania.com in 2005: create your maps, adopt GeoRSS… Obviously, we have to push further, being ahead of Google is like an interesting challenge.

On the business level, others will feel more pressure. Ours is a side project for a small company, sustainable so far, and feeling no pressure from investors or the bubble-burst-buzz around. Our focus is strengthen the features of Tagzania to better please users, and don’t care much about Techcrunch gossip or how others may be sweating. As for the big actors, Google, Yahoo: We at Tagzania see their adoption of standards as a positive move, and the availability of APIs and web resources that precisely those giants are pushing, that’s only good news for us. Then they add direct services that start-ups have imagined first, but, of course, we know that’s going to happen some day, with this, that and many other things. But there’s room for niches and tailored community websites or services, no doubt about this.

Some days ago I posted about Basque geo data getting free to the web. Now it's the turn for Catalan geodata. Thanks to Marc Belzunces, in KML and spreadsheet formats, and distributed with a nice free license. Well done!

It's a set of over 1800 municipalities in the territories where Catalan is spoken.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a project that is getting more exciting day after day. Not long ago, the permalinks of their maps showed public satellite imagery from Landsat, but now they have their own maps sufficiently developed, to show them directly (using the interface based in OpenLayers). BTW, the way to get permalinks in OpenStreetMap is not that obvious, but there's one easy method: Browse the OSM world, drag the map with the mouse, zoom somewhere, double click on the map to center... and then, above the map, click on View. The permalink will appear on your browser URL bar.

World coverage varies greatly, but London and the UK look great, and then there's this new effort for Baghdad, something promising, in my view.

And besides, there's Eibar, my hometown, and workplace:



That's the first free and open map of some piece of the Basque Country, a bunch of roads and streets in Eibar, traced by my coleague Gari Araolaza.

Is there any OpenStreetMap coverage around your place? Tagzania let's you check that. Below every individual map, there's the option to open the OpenStreetMap link to look.

The London-based real-estate mapping start-up, Nestoria, which I mentioned some posts back, continues advancing steadily. They now cover the whole of the UK, have permalinks for given latitudes, longitudes and bounding boxes, offer the possibility to embed their maps elsewhere...

But one feature introduced today has just been announced at an event in the UK by Mikel Maron, geo-hacker behind Mapstraction, GeoRSS and other things: open maps in a commercial mashup!.



Look at this map here, encapsulated in an iframe with their code. It's in the Isle of Wight, in the southern coast of England, and although you may see the Googlemaps watermark, imagery is not Google's but from OSM (Open Street Map). They have mapped quite well that area, produced vectorial maps with the aggregated info, and those maps have been inserted like tiles into Nestoria. Looks as if a static and local bunch of map tiles is being called, instead of dynamic calls to some server, but, however, a nice achievement, which they explain in more detail in their blog. Great shot, Nestoria! (I am certainly sympathetic to them: one of the founders of the company behind is Javier Etxebeste, a Basque Internet entrepreneur, formerly director of Yahoo Europe).

Mikel Maron announces another achivement in his blog: a Mapstraction demo. One code, three mapping APIs. Fantastic.