The English Cemetery

The Cemetery, this blog, is no longer trilingual. It turns bilingual: Basque and English. The Spanish side does not disappear, it migrates, to a domain of its own. There it is: Mapamovil.net

It has a robuts blog header, yes. A variation on the work of Italian Hyperrealist artist Maurizio Cattelan.

Why? The Webdosbeta workshop was very positive for us. Good feedback, contacts... Looked like an opportunity to continue comenting map-related things for the Spanish audience in a new blog.

We did receive praise in English as well. The report by french blogger Yannick Laclau, who writes about tech issues from Barcelona, was truly encouraging...

I feel envious of web 2.0 events like the ones that TechCrunch organizes. The location (see pasted map below) in California, is a little bit far us, and not only in geographic terms, I'm afraid.

However, I am glad that a presentation about Tagzania entered into the WebDosBeta selection, a workshop next week in Madrid to meet among web 2.0 entrepreneurs and else.

Besides ours, the other projects listed seem interesting, in this first web 2.0 event in Spain. The bigger ones are probably Musicstrands and Fon , which have more backing than Tagzania, obviously. Particularly Fon, a venture launched by Martin Varsavsky Argentinian tech-entrepreneur of fame. Fon is a sort of big wifi connectivity system based in the long tail of users with wifi routers...

Another english-language project is EyeOS. Other interesting things are more blog-related and so far, in Spanish.

Interestingly, Yannick Laclau will be covering the event in English.

Sure. Tagzania is buzzword compliant. The certification has been issued by Programmableweb, which has included our site in the official Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix, there were Google Maps and del.icio.us mix up.

We were not present at the big web 2.0 conference. California is far. But we will be at a Spanish event in Madrid, Webdosbeta. I'll give a short presentation, one of the 10 selected from 22 proposals submitted to the conference.

The Long Tail

It's nice to be labelled as web 2.0, one of those buzzwords so widely used lately. But here there is, another buzzword which perhaps also fits Tagzania: The Long Tail.

Like Tagzania, the long tail of geographic data ;-)

Sounds funny, but maybe it's true: Crime sceneries, wifi spots, traffic jams in big cities, real state listings... all those are getting their share in the so-called Google Maps mashups, because those interest points have potentially great audiences. They are at the high-end of the tail.

But it's the minimal audience of everyones personal spots which will not be provided by the Big Ones.

And, at the end, maybe thousands of users with tens of thousands of spots might create a long long tail of geographic data. That should be Tagzania's place on the web... But how do we reach to that promise from this little corner, a rural valley in the Basque Country? Not easy for us, bunch of basques with berets. As a first step, we'll go to Madrid. Wow, that's a big city. :-)