The English Cemetery

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. :-)

Some days ago, Jon Udell, a well-known tech guru, posted an article about Excel spreadsheets that might be generated dynamically with Zope. His point was that the next generation of MS Office products, with XML capabilities, will be a great advance as it will be possible to generate spreadsheets or other documents, generating XML output out of web applications.

Well, my coleague engineers at CodeSyntax (mainly Gari and Jatsu) opened their eyes... Of course Udell is right, but spreadsheet generation can be achieved (in the case of Excel) even without XML, since Excel deals with HTML tables to directly convert them as spreadsheets. You don't need to wait for that new Office version. We already do it a long time ago with Zope, learned from here, and use this in several projects,

You just need to export from Excel to HTML, and then upload it to Zope as ZPT or DTML and insert the required ZPT or DTML sentences.

So, Gari pointed this to Jon Udell, and, well, the guru was intrigued, particularly if this method did preserve formulas in the Excel files generated... The answer is yes. Here, a little demo to demonstrate it.

I post this at my blog 'cause these friends of mine don't blog in English. Gari and Jatsu were also excited that a tech-guru exchanges info with them, just around the same time that he interviews Bill Gates.

I am acting now as a sort of Spanish reporter for Google Maps Mania where I have written about a new Spanish project: Vivirama. What Housingmaps does with Craigslist ads, that's what Vivirama does with Loquo ads from Barcelona.

The creator, Xabi Caballé, uses a GIS to geocode addresses. Cannot reach to other Loquo cities for now, because address geocoding is a expensive and propietary thing in Europe. In the US looks easier, as there is Geocoder.us there.

However, in my opinion the future for Craigslist and Loquo lies not in letting others do the geocoding thing, but in geocoding addresses by themselves, and offering them in the RSS feeds. That way, the ones like Vivirama or Housingmaps will proliferate in a much easier way: the ads will be featured in maps and local/locative services smoothly. Geocoding the whole of Europe is certainly expensive for Xabi Caballé, but might be a sensible step for Loquo. I guess that there might be resources there, as Loquo was acquired by eBay (which also has a stake in Craigslist) some months ago for its Kijiji network of city-classified sites.

I posted this opinion at Ubaldo Huerta's blog (he is the creator of Loquo) and he seems to agree...

Fascinating story that I know from Ogle Earth. A blogger in Italy, checking the Google Maps satellite imagery of the places that he knows, detects some strange anomalies on the lands of Sorbolo, blogs about them, maps them, and then, well, it happens that there is an ancient Roman Villa in those fields!

Ogle Earth added the first point in Tagzania. Then I couldn't resist to reproduce at Tagzania the locations that Luca Mori found around Sorbolo. There it is, the listing and seen from the satellite.

Now my weblog is geolocated. I included the ICBM tag in the meta-code of its HTML, so it follows the GeoURL convention. The English Cemetery, can therefore, as well, be geottaged at Tagzania with the GeoURL bookmarklet that we deployed. There it is.

It may work the other way round, locate yourself at Tagzania, and then use the lat/lon coordinates to add ICMB metatags to your blog.

Some Tagzania users have commented that they would like just their feeds to be added to Tagzania, so their geolocalization automatically updates, instead of manually adding items. It could be, but I have doubts: has a geolocated blog make much sense? The location of a blog lies in cyberspace, it is the Universal Resource Location quite obviously. Can a blog or blogger be tied to a precise geographical location? Maybe, particularly for corporate blogs, but generally, it's this post or that one that refers to a given location, or perhaps, several locations mentioned in a post. A travel blog, for instance, it doesn't make sense that it might be geolocated with the GeoURL ICBM stuff.

But well, after all, the English Cemetery is an actual place, the blog title refers to a real burial place in "Donostia: ... so, I "geolocated it. Now, don't expect me to find me around blogging with a laptop.

Blogs and geolocation: there are experiments out there, certainly. This Slovenian community of blogs is geolocated following the GeoURL-ICBM model. But rather than trying to do such a thing among Basques, I would prefer that people could geolocate things they mention in their blogs... the way this Spanish literary blogger does it is nice: he blogs about a novel, Rayuela, by the late Argentinan writer Julio Cortazar, a story located in Paris. The blogger posts comments and pictures of places mentioned in Ratuela, and then uses Tagzania to trace them, and to show them to readers. That's more consistent geolocation of blogs, than the other one, in my opinion. However, this is open to tastes, and people pushing in different directions, that's nice.

BTW, I updated the image on the right corner of the header, as well, with a new Tagzania snapshot. Awful design remains unchanged.

Ten years after Netscape's stock debut, great review of Internet's history, present and future at Wired: We are the Web by Kevin Kelly. Inspiring, truly, for those working around the net.

One remarkable thing. In the present stage of Internet, as Kelly depicts the 2005 scene, the most outstanding phenomenon in his eyes is blogging. But, then, he remarks several mapping and locative marvels of the web. That's encouraging, as we are so busy with Tagzania right now. Extracts from the article:

• Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works.
• This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze of a spot in the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking.
• Cartography has gone from spectator art to participatory democracy.

The Netscape stock debut 10 years ago seems to mark the beggining of the net as an economic fact. The newspaper Le Monde also devoted a special report this august to that fact. Bought it while vacationing around. The last quotation of the report, by a Yale professor, Yochai Benkler, specialized in the net economy: Le rôle economique du comportament social devient plus important...

Tagzania has been accused several times, since its launch, by a troll that accuses our site to be plagiarism, a copy of another web effort: Beenmapped.

We have tried to answer some of those allegations, as the ones that appeared at Oogle Earth. But finally, it's been a relief the note that Beenmapped itself has published:

August 16th, 2005. Some comments have been surfacing on some Google Maps blogs on the net about BeenMapped and Tagzania. Those were not written by me nor I endorse or approve such comments.

Tagzania and BeenMapped are quite different as Tagzania authors also agree. If you enjoy BeenMapped or Tagzania, we're happy you do, but there's no need or reason to make accusations of plagiarism. Thank you.

It was obvious that troll behaviour was not in the style of a map & web enthusiast like the person behind Beenmapped. Looks like the troll lives much more near: its first appearance was in Barrapunto, the Spanish Slashdot, and has appeared in other Spanish sites. Then the troll seems the follow the track of Tagzania references that the creators of it leave through del.icio.us. For instance, he/she appeared at the nice Lifehack review that placed Tagzania among the top 10 of GoogleMaps developments.

A close watcher of us...

Now, the troll will have no alibi. Thanks to Beenmapped. Good luck to that project! It obviously has things in common with Tagzania, fundamentally the will to share maps, places, among people... Trolls don't do that, they are not for communities, not for sharing, only destroying.

A new website to collect data as seen in the satellite imagery of Google Maps: Google Maps Explorer. It's a nice site. Categorization resembles tagging at Tagzania.

There's a sensible category on the first page: TEMPORARY. Many of the things that we spot with Google Maps/Earth are obviously temporary: a plane flying here or there, for instance. On the long term, when imagery gets renewed, what will happen to those dozens of curious images being bookmarked now? they will be forgotten? Perhaps something like Google Maps Explorer may function as an Archive.org-like directory of marvelous things (images) past.

Open the geo-data! Free the maps! Totally right point in a brilliant manifesto (Ten Things That Will Be Free, a provocative essay by Wikipedia creator Jimbo Wales, now guestblogging at Lessig's blog, the creator of Creative Commonso...) As for open maps, doing our bit with Tagzania . The rest of the 10 points, all right.

Particularly interesting the TV listings item.

Also the need for free dictionaries. This one, I would complete it with another vindication: Free NLP! (Natural Language Processing), or in other words, Free grammar, syntax and morphology!, for these areas of language are also subject to propietary software, closed developments, and restricted access to resources and solutions. It's happening with Basque, and surely with many languages: not only lexical items (the stuff of dictionaries), languages need freedom in several ways.

On the many suggestions that the manifesto is getting, I would also encourage that Free Directory or Yellow Pages vindication, in the line of the Wikicompany project (also interesting by its use of maps, I see confluences with Tagzania there...)

Back on april, someone noticed two curious web developments: the first proliferation of Googlemaps mash-ups (then sort of hacked maps, before the API opened up legal and documented usage) with the Craigslist listings shown graphically, and the appearance of Memorymaps at Flickr: images that have annotated comments about places that have been important in someone's live. This seems to be a meme initiated by Matt Haughey, creator of Metafilter, and it has has followers at Flickr, check tags memorymap and memorymaps and these pools: one, two.

Curiosly, the application we launched 3 weeks ago, Tagzania, has been used for the very same functionality by the early adopters of the tool. So there are now live memorymaps (as opposed to the still images at Flickr) directly constructed over Google Maps using Tagzania accounts.

I think Earl Mardle from New Zealand was the pioneer at Tagzania. Check his year tags and look at a given map, like the one from 1970.

Other users that are doing similar things: Johnnysoko and Lauschender, both have decided to use a MyLife tag and there they are, memporymapping their lives.

I wonder if the first memorymappers of Tagzania came to this idea after the Flickr meme, or it blossomed independently.