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ARTCODES is Emily Chang, an award-winning web and interactive designer, consultant, and technology strategist.

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Maps

Virtual plazes become real

Friday, August 26, 2005

The web has always attracted me because of the play between what’s real, virtual, and how one can become the other fairly easily.  While others have framed this much more eloquently than I (eg. Tim Berners Lee on the semantic web), it’s the asynchronous and networked nature of the web that feels the most like our own brains - capable of multiple paths and interlinking, fluid at each moment of our consciousness, and with the potential to make live connections and topical relationships.

Just the other day, I blogged about Plazes, the new location-mapping site.  I had originally found the site through Joi Ito‘s blog, which I’ve been reading for a number of years now. 

Today, I’m logged into my plazes page while consulting at Six Apart, and I notice that Joi Ito is showing in my 2km range at the Technorati office on 3rd street, just one block away.  I close plazes to check email and not more than ten minutes later, Joi Ito walks by my desk. 

I get home around 6:30, flip open my laptop and my plazes icon is showing I have a message.  I log onto my plazes page again to find a message from Peter, the first person who had commented on my plazes post the other day and who had also blogrolled both Max and I that same day.  We click to see who’s in the 2 km range, and sure enough, Peter is no longer in Canada but at his newly-claimed location, “Hotel Diva” just a few blocks from here, where we’ve also stayed!

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Posted by emily chang on 08.26.05
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gVisit visitor maps

Sunday, August 21, 2005

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Continuing my search for new mapping technologies, I came across gVisit, another project developed using the Google map API.  gVisit allows you to track visitors to your website using Google Maps.  I’ve signed up and am waiting for it to log my site sometime in the next hour.  When it’s generated, I should be able to see visitor locations on a Google map (the sample shown above is the visitor log for gVisit).  The actual map is a bit slow from what I can tell, and I’m wondering if all the map images are generated off the same Google server and it’s slowing to a crawl? 

UPDATE: gVisit has me hooked!  I saw my first visitor traffic (screenshot pop-up) come in from Buenos Aires at 5:11 pm.  Now it will be interesting to see how these match up with my other site traffic statistics program.  Upon a quick glance, it looks like gVisit is already filtering out the bots.  I’ve added side link to view my visitor map.

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Posted by emily chang on 08.21.05
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Plazes location mapping

Saturday, August 20, 2005

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Twenty-four hours ago, I was playing with IndyJunior and wishing I could add more real-time data to the map or share the data with someone in more ways than just a hover with text information (date, name, note).  Ask the Internet and you shall receive.  Visit plazes, “a grassroot approach to location-aware interaction, using the local network you are connected to as location reference. Plazes allows you to share you location with the people you know and to discover people and plazes around you. It’s the navigation system for your social life and it’s absolutely free.”

It seems like the site has a mostly European audience at this time.  Once you signup, you can start discovering and claiming different locations, customize your profile page, invite friends to join, view other members, search by surrounding distance to see who’s online, and you can even tag your photos in Flickr and pull them into Plazes.  There are also a number of ways to display your data including an IndyJunior map showing the last 30 days, 60 days, and so on.  I love it when web apps evolve based on previous favorites.

What I liked about this idea is that it’s location-awareness based on physical places.  You can’t add a new plaze unless you are at a new location and “the launcher” detects that your router’s address has changed.  Having only discovered one plaze, I can already see the potential of this type of interaction.  The virtual environment is now encouraging me to engage in real interaction - both to venture out into the city and world to find new places that have not yet been discovered and to create a historical record of the places I frequent for others to share, interact, or communicate. 

Plazes and social software
We like to consider Plazes next generation social software. Obviously, any kind of interaction system involving people is social software. Lately the term has been coined towards ‘six-degrees-of-separation’ software like friendster or orkut. Plazes takes it to the next level regarding location-awareness and impliciteness. The Plazes you are frequenting are actually a much better filtering system and common denominator than explicit connections like “he is my friend”. By being virtually present at certain Plazes like a record label or a certain restaurant and having conversations via comments at that Plaze, the system is much closer to how we actually interact in the real world. By being able to annotate real world locations virtually, Plazes augments, enhances and encourages real-world communication rather than simulating it. Nevertheless, Plazes does allows you to declare other users as friends. This simply means that you trust the person in regard of your personal information. Plazes allows you to specify for every bit of profile information wether it’s visible only to your friends or to everybody. Unlike with friendster and the likes, you cannot see who your friend’s friends are.

I’ve signed up and you can now see where I am.

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Posted by emily chang on 08.20.05
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Web mapping technology

Friday, August 19, 2005

I was searching to see if anyone had released some Ajax-driven maps and came across “Build AJAX-Based Web Maps Using ka-Map" by Tyler Mitchell which led me to an open source map tool called ka-Map.  I’ve downloaded it and plan to try it out this weekend.

Also, if you have seen these already, some other mapping projects worth checking out:

iPod Subway Maps
Flash Earth
CNET story about a9 street maps

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Posted by emily chang on 08.19.05
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XML and Flash map of my travels

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I found Bryan Boyer’s IndyJunior several years ago when it was still v1.3 and played with it back then.  For some reason, it popped into my head again the other day so I went and downloaded the latest version (now 1.6) and have put up a map of my past travels.  I’ve made it oversized - IndyGiant, if you will.  The flash movie simply calls an XML file with name, location, longtitude and latitude coordinates to plot the points and routes on the map.  You can also see a different representation of my travels made with world66.com mapping last March.

Posted by emily chang on 08.19.05
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Mash-up the web

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

While the term mash-up has its roots in hip hop culture, the web mash-up seems a natural evolution of our need to customize and our love of hacks.  (See an earlier post on creating “clever solutions to an interesting problem.") In Sampling the Web’s Best Mash-Ups, Business Week provides “a guided tour of the some of the most innovative sites that combine data and features of other sites to make something new.”

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Posted by emily chang on 07.27.05
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So blue

Thursday, November 04, 2004

The BBC has a map that shows red and blue states from past elections dating back to 1948 (click on the tab “Past Elections").  Now how do we get the map to look like 1964 again?

Depressing 2004 election map:
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Posted by emily chang on 11.04.04
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Another reason to love SF

Sunday, October 31, 2004

Ithaca had it’s share of progressives as well, but I’m very happy to be in a city where “such soul-deep loathing of George W. Bush is common in the Bay Area, a region dyed the deepest indigo on the bluest state on the electoral map.” Now I just hope people across the country wake up (!) on Tuesday and vote this guy out of office.

Read more in: Bay Area bluest in blue state.

Posted by emily chang on 10.31.04
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Around the world

Sunday, March 28, 2004

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My travels so far…

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Posted by emily chang on 03.28.04
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