Maps, travel, and making the world a smaller place
If you haven't already, go on over and check out Lee Lefever's The World Is Not Flat site, affectionately known as "TWINF". It's running on Bryght, and we had a hand in twiddling a few bits of the code -- specifically, Colin mucked with maps and is now an AJAX god (or so he tells us) and Richard wrestled with custom PHP snippets and blocks. The always powerful Mark Yuasa of Raincity Studios did the CSS-fu to keep the site looking daisy fresh.
Why should you care about TWINF? Well, number 1, Lee (of Common Craft fame) is a very cool guy who is going to be travelling around the world next year with his wife Sachi. It fits in the category of international travel blog, but Lee and Sachi don't just want you to be able to keep up with what they're doing...they want to hear from you. The idea is to gather people's experiences which will help them decide where to go and what to visit (and what not to visit).
What coolio Web 2.0 features did we help cook up? Well, as I mentioned, Colin did some neat map work -- a global map will display Lee and Sachi's posts around the world, and an AJAX interface shows posts from a particular city when clicked on. You can also vote on individual entries, plus there is a tag cloud interface for dispatches and countries.
In any case, congrats to everyone for getting TWINF live. I'm jealous that Lee and Sachi are going on such a fun trip, sad that we won't see them for a long time, and also wish them all the best. Special bonus tip: visit the Blog Flux Map Stats page to see where people are visiting the site from.
But wait, there's more! Why point to just one map interface when you can point to 2? Jason and Di-Ann let me know that they have a preview of their site Platial up and running, and I spent a little bit of time poking around. It's also Google Maps powered, and has a very innovative interface: maps have lots of "layers", you can create your own maps, there's tagging. All the cool kid Web 2.0 stuff. Update: feel free to swing by http://preview.palatial.com to kick the tires.
Note to Jason and Di-Ann: you need to have a public place (e.g. forums, blog posts, whatever) to gather feedback -- a mailto: link doesn't cut it anymore. Where's the Platial blog?
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Comments
I am steering clear of Blog Flux Map Stats
I got spammed by them in response to my post about my gVisit map. They offer more info than gVisit, but I can't support spamming people.
Spam?
What do you mean by spam? Did they email you in response to your post? Just interested, since I don't tend to see a comment via email as spam...
Unsolicited Commercial Email
Yep, I posted on my site about gVisit, and a couple days later received an unsolicited email about MapStats from the owner/creator. Tis SPAM to me, maybe not to you.
Yeah, that's not spam to me
It's commenting on a post via email. It was, IMHO, "solicited" by you posting about it. But I understand that some people have strong feelings when it comes to spam.
Fair enough.
We see it differently.
What if I posted about I posted about my webhost, the another webhosting company emails me saying their service is better and that I should switch to them? That is still spam to me. How/where do you draw the line?
I don't feel that just because I post about it on my website I am inviting email. The exception would be if I asked for input on alternatives. In that case I would want comments on the post, not email sent to me.
My 2 cents though.