Tagzania Blog

There was something we hidden when we renewed Tagzania, route distances. The information was in our database but it wasn’t shown. Now you can see this information below the map, have a look at this image of the Donostia beach walk:

You can choose how you want to see the distance, kilometers or miles. This can be selected in the user’s preferences page.

Distances are back in Tagzania because you asked for it, this time through UserVoice’s feedback app.

Go on telling us what you need!

As you might have noticed, we’ve done some changes in Tagzania.

• We are using UserVoice’s Feedback application. You can see it in the left part of every page in Tagzania. We want to enable new ways of getting users feedback and UserVoice’s tool looks great for that. If you click on the Feedback button, you can see other users suggestions or submit your own ideas about Tagzania, you can also report any bug you found.

• See all your tags: some weeks ago we developed a tag suggestion feature to help those who are adding a place in Tagzania and don’t remember which tags they used before. But some users gave us some feedback about the tag suggestion so we decided to insert a button to see all your tags during the process. Have a look to the “See all your tags”option, and then what happens after clicking on it.

• Download all your places without limits: this is another user request. Some of you have a lot of places added in Tagzania. Whenever youaa wanted to download the KML with your places, there was a limit of 200 points. Now you can download a KML with all your points, whithout any limits, on your user page (i.e. www.tagzania.com/user/your_user_name), next to the “Edit preferences” button.

• Contact us and permalink links are another change we’ve done. If you click on the first one, you can send us a message about something you’ve noticed on a certain place (wrong info, wrong place, …).

This changes have been done thinking on users, hope we’re right and you enjoy them.

Last weeks we’ve noticed an increasing activity in Tagzania about Antonio Machado’s life, one of the most popular Spanish poets. Many users have saved places where Machado lived, such as, Sevilla, his birthplace, Paris, where he met Oscar Wilde, or Colliure, the French town where Machado died.

We’ve found a blog (in Spanish) related to these users, where a Spanish language teacher has published some assignments. One of them is adding in Tagzania Antonio Machado’s life map. These are some of the users that have done so: rosypatry, xik77, trabajomachado, etc.

Antonio Machado map

There’s another Spanish blog talking about how maps can help Spanish language teachers and they also talk about us.

Thanks a lot!

Some weeks ago we launched a survey to know what do you think about Tagzania. Our idea is finding ways of improving our service.

One of the things we’ve just developed is the tag suggestion. Every time you add a new place you have to add some tags. If you’re a hard user and you’ve got a lot of tags, it’s not easy remembering them. With this tag suggestion feature, you just need to type three characters and we’ll show you the tags you’ve already used with those characters.

In these example you can see how I’ve just typed “tok” and Tagzania suggests me “tokyo“.

These days we’re doing some research work to discover your feelings about Tagzania. We’d like to know what do you think about our new version and which improvements should we develop. In fact, we’ve got two different surveys, one for our active users and another one for the visitors (like people coming from search engines).

This morning we sent an email to our users so that they can answer some questions in this survey.

We’ve also added some text and a link in Tagzania to the visitors survey.

We’d really appreciate if you could take a minute to help us improving Tagzania

As soon as we heard My Tracks’ launch last week we decided we had to test it with our HTC G1 Android phone. So I took my bike and went for a ride. I’ve got a Garmin GPS so I’m an intermediate user of this kind of devices.

My Tracks is really simple to use, you just press a button and it starts recording a new track. When you finish, you can send it to your account in Google Maps and Google Docs. You can also share the KML or GPX or send it to an email. With my Garmin GPS device is not as easy as with the G1. My Tracks shows the typical info for a track like average speed or distance and a really cool altimeter graphic.

Here you have an image of my Saturday bike-ride:

But everything is not so wonderful. By the time I got home, two hours and a half later, the G1 was close to run out of battery, which is a really bad news for a phone. I’ve mentioned you can see some cool info about your track and a nice altimeter graphic, but all these get lost when you send your information to Google. The track info is in Google Docs and the track itself in Google Maps, but the altimeter graphic is not available. It would be nice having all the info the same place.

Another cool option could be having the chance of sending the track from the phone to Tagzania

Motorola announced last week that their next cell phones will be running Android, Google´s operating system. At the moment, Motorola´s mobile phones were using Symbian. This announcement is not the only one pointing that Android has a brilliant future. Other companies like Sony Ericsson, Toshiba or Garmin will start soon using Android.

In Tagzania we also believe in Android, that´s why we have a new gadget in our brand new office: Google´s G1 Android phone for developers. We didn´t need too much time for deciding to buy this amazing phone. We bought it because of this special offer for developers.

Now it´s time to start working with Android and see how we can develop a useful application.

Trying to cleanup the site, we decided to remove drastically and then start adding elements to the page. So we removed latitude and longitude data for the regular view (and Microformats, as the lines of code worked for both of them).

Now after so many of you requesting the coordinates, we have decided to show them again. Of course, Microformats are active too. Thanks for your feedback and enjoy!

About microformats

If you want to learn about microformats, take a look at these links:

• Microformat Wikipedia article
• Microformats.org
• Operator plugin for Firefox

We’re working hard to improve the new version of the site. Some bug repairing and optimization is taking place these days. Thanks for your feedback and stay tuned as new features are coming.

But we just wanted to advance and present you a little hack in Tagzania.

Tagzania uses Mapstraction

In most of Tagzania’s maps, we don’t use the Google Maps API directly. We’re using an intermediate smart library called Mapstraction.

From their website:

Mapstraction is a library that provides a common API for various javascript mapping APIs to enable switching from one to another as smoothly as possible. Developers can code their applications once, and then easily switch mapping provider based on project needs, terms and conditions, and new functionality.

It’s a cool tool.  Thanks to Mapstraction, we can plug any mapping service into Tagzania. Now you can see your Tagzania places with Yahoo, Microsoft, or even OpenStreetMap maps.

For now, you can test it just adding a parameter at the end of your URL in Tagzania, and you will get the requested map layer. For instance:

• San Sebastian in Google
• San Sebastian in OpenStreetmap
• San Sebastian in Yahoo
• San Sebastian in Microsoft
• San Sebastian in Freeearth

So, if some of the mapping services has better coverage in your area, you can hack the Tagzania URL, just adding ?map=yahoo or ?map=microsoft or ?map=openstreetmap . For example, see the Forbidden City in Beijing mapped in OpenStreetMap.

You will need to hack the URLs to access this feature for now, but we are thinking about how to implement it so that it can be used by any user, maybe depending  on user preferences, or a combo box somewhere, or depending on the place editors choice or…  What do you think about it?

Yes, that’s right. We want to know what’s your opinion about the new Tagzania.

Some of you have already done it by posting a comment in this blog (thanks Rhys!), using the mailing list (like Mkk or Jason) or writing us an email to tagzania (at) gmail.com (like our IPY friends and Matteo have done).

That’s the only way of improving Tagzania, knowing your thoughts on the new version.

Thanks a lot!