The English Cemetery

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.

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.