Streetplans, Platial and other things

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.