Sunday, April 29, 2007

Streetplans for Taiwan, Thailand and several European countries

An update in the maps lets us display roadmaps and streetplans in several new countries: Thailand, Turkey, Lithuania, Estonia, Eslovenia,Croatia and Taiwan. The Chinese script used in Taiwan and the Thai alphabet look pretty nice on the maps.



Besides, Russia has had some enhancements in its roadmaps, but not much city plans available, Moscow had already streetplans, and now Sankt Petersburg joins.

See examples in:
If you live in one of those countries, check the streets around you.

tagzania - Sat, 28 Apr 2007 00:57:15 -0400


Source: http://www.tagzania.com/blog/news/streetplans-for-taiwan-thailand-and-several-european-countries
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Friday, April 27, 2007

Support Tagzania in Startup2

We've submitted Tagzania to a European Startup contest, where several Web 2.0 projects will compete for recognition. If you like Tagzania, and want to help us promoting a little bit this service that hosts your places and maps, give us a hand:

Register here and then vote for Tagzania.

You can browse the rest of the projects to decide if there are others worth receiving your vote, of course.

tagzania - Fri, 27 Apr 2007 07:14:59 -0400


Source: http://www.tagzania.com/blog/news/support-tagzania-in-startup2
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Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Photos around

There's a new option to open maps elsewhere now. Below Tagzania individual maps, you know, you have various mapping apps linked, where you can explore other views of the places saved in Tagzania.



Until now, for photos, there was a Flickr link showing picture geolocated around any location. Now look, besides the Flickr link, there's one to Panoramio. Opening those links from Tagzania, you can see a good bunch of photos of the surroundings of many places in the world.

A project by some Spanish web enthusiasts, Panoramio is much more directed towards location and geography than Flickr. As a matter of fact, it's a site to place photos on the map. It's very well integrated with Google Earth as well. Give it a try if your photos tend to be associated to location, and you want to host them in the web.


tagzania - Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:55:27 -0400


Source: http://www.tagzania.com/blog/news/photos-around
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Friday, April 20, 2007

Search for addresses in Belgium and Luxembourg

You can now search for postal addresses in Belgium and Luxembourg when posting thru Tagzania's interface (for registered users).

Belgium is a multilingual country, and address searches will work in various forms, like Guimardstraat 6-8, 1040 Brussel BE in Dutch or Rue Guimard 6-8, 1040 Bruxelles BE in French. Using both, you will land something near to the Australian Embassy and Mission to the EU, Belgium and Luxembourg. This other embassy in Luxembourg City, we found it searching for 22 Boulevard Emmanuel Servais, L-2535 Luxembourg LU.

Remember the tips for address searches, and just add the country codes BE, LU or NL after your Beneluxian addresses for nicer matches.

tagzania - Fri, 20 Apr 2007 06:32:23 -0400


Source: http://www.tagzania.com/blog/news/search-for-addresses-in-belgium-and-luxembourg
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Messi or Maradona, the satellite view

Who scored the best goal in history? We're talking about football, that is, soccer. Leo (Leonel) Messi scored a super goal last tuesday playing with FC Barcelona against another Spanish team, Getafe, playing semifinals of the Spanish Cup Competition.

The feat mimicked a goal by Diego Armando Maradona 20 years ago, 2-0 against England in Mexico's World Cup of 1986. Many have held this goal to be the best in the history of football. That's open to discussion now, and you may judge by yourselves thanks to Internet, and the flash video players that abound on the web.

Both stadiums where those goals were scored, Nou Camp in Barcelona and Estadio Azteca in Mexico DF are quite visible in the satellite views, so we just drawed the routes both players actually run over the field to score those goals... This is Messi's race towards the goalkeeper and this is Maradona's.

In the standard view that opens, it's a pity, but the automatically calculated zoom level is too close, as the routes are quite tiny by earthly standards, but if you just zoom out one level, you'll see the green fields.




You may also open the KML link below the maps to see it in Google Earth. Of course, there was no need for this mashup to be created, a geographical representantion of the best goals ever, but sometimes it's fun to have a casual friday.

BTW, we've introduced a new way to add lines/routes to your Tagzania account. The option above the maps, that checkbox to "add an item on click", when used, will now prompt two options on the map, post a new item (for points) or post a new route.




Some tech difficulties don't let us yet use that option on route maps, but you may try with tags, user pages or  individual point locations.

tagzania - Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:18:08 -0400


Source: http://www.tagzania.com/blog/news/messi-or-maradona-the-satellite-view
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Thursday, April 19, 2007

New bookmarklet and options regarding Multimap

Multimap is a nice mapping application that made a leap forward yesterday: they introduced an API and evolved towards a new kind of online map: drag and move maps, aerial and roadmap combinations in imagery (very original for the hybrid view)...



We've updated a couple of features in Tagzania to welcome that move. Now, below individual maps, on the open maps options, there's a link to the new improved Multimap. Check your locations, and open the Multimap links to see how the look in the new site. Aerial coverage seems good for USA cities, but not in Europe, for the moment...

On the other hand, we've upgraded the Tagzai! Multimap bookmarklet. It's now v3, version 3, as there were two previous bookmarklets that served that website. This bookmarklet might be useful for searching addresses in several European countries. When using the address search included in Tagzania (post option for registered users), that will work in the following countries: the US (United States), CA (Canada), ES (Spain), FR (France), DE (Germany), IT (Italy), NL (Netherlands), SE (Sweden), AU (Australia), NZ (New Zealand), JP (Japan). You need to find some address in another place? Well, use Multimap if it happens to be in the UK, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Portugal, Norway and Finland. Once found, save the location in Tagzania with the Tagzai! Multimap v3 bookmarklet.

Check the bookmarklet section to get that.

tagzania - Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:10:25 -0400


Source: http://www.tagzania.com/blog/news/new-bookmarklet-and-options-regarding-multimap
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Scroll with your mouse wheel to zoom in and out in your Tagzania maps

After an update at the Google Maps API just announced in their blog, we introduced a feature in Tagzania: when you're looking at a Tagzania map, be it a roite (the next Berlin marathon) or some other (latest deadly tornados in the southeast US), also embedded maps in blogs and elsewhere, you can now zoom in and out, just scrolling with the wheel of your mouse.


(pic by Rodrigo Senna, nicely licensed)

On the other hand, we're glad to now that NeoBinaries chose Tagzania as the 2nd nicer mashup in their list of 5 picks. Congrats to PlanJam, the n.1 site of that list.

tagzania - Thu, 19 Apr 2007 03:27:57 -0400


Source: http://www.tagzania.com/blog/news/scroll-with-your-mouse-wheel-to-zoom-in-and-out-in-your-tagzania-maps
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Thursday, April 5, 2007

GeoRSS for routes in Tagzania

Following the introduction of routes in Tagzania last week, we've added a feature today: GeoRSS. For any given route like this one, the Marathon of Madrid to be held in a couple of weeks, below the map there's the option to download a KML file to visualize that on Google Earth, and a GeoRSS link as well

GeoRSS is quite an interesting beast. It's not only a feed with latitude and longitude, its specs cover a broad variety of geographic information. A line or area can be specified in GeoRSS, and being an open standard, we believe it's a format to support. For routes, it's a GML flavor of GeoRSS which we have chosen. GML is the Geography Markup Language, an XML grammar written in XML Schema for the modelling, transport, and storage of geographic information... Standards are good, we believe in them.

Google Maps and its API recently integrated GeoRSS into its framework. That was good news for Tagzania. Now that you haver GeoRSS feeds for routes, you can put that into work with the Google Maps API. Look, here's the result at Google Maps when you pass the GeoRSS file of that marathon race to them.

Today, there's more news regarding Google's new My Maps option. It's an interesting move towards a wider adoption of the concept of personal geography... More people will see that creating your own maps is an interesting use for the web, and we'll continue building Tagzania, so we can offer you an easy way to share and document your personal geography.

tagzania - Thu, 05 Apr 2007 13:47:09 -0400


Source: http://www.tagzania.com/blog/news/georss-for-routes-in-tagzania
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Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Documenting locations more precisely

Some enhancements in Tagzania now let you document locations more precisely.

First, descriptions for places let you now write much more text, up to 2000 characters from the previous 256 limit. Here's an example, the Victoria Falls.

If you introduce HTML in those descriptions, it would be cleansed. There's another way to mark web links in locations, and that's the resources field of every location. You introduce image or general URLs there, and they are attached to the location. Take in mind that these links are saved in a way that gives no pagerank or relevance for search engines and robots: learn more about resources here.

Precisely, another novelty comes with the presentation of those resources documenting the location. Look at the listing of locations here or there. The novelty is that when resources are present, first URL of your resource list, will appear in the listings, as this image shows:



For instance, the first link in this list of Venture Capital related blogs here,  corresponds to the offices of Vulcan in Seattle which is documented with 5
resources, 3 pictures and two web addresses. The item interface shows all resources (up to ten per point or route are allowed), but in overall listings, until now only one picture (the first of the images in the resource list) appeared; now the first of weblinks will appear.
   
So, if you have documented a place with web URLs, now they are more visible and accesible to users in general.

Finally, marking locations with a red little icon (for points) or a green one (for routes) is also helpful, we believe.

tagzania - Wed, 04 Apr 2007 07:30:01 -0400


Source: http://www.tagzania.com/blog/news/documenting-locations-more-precisely
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