Tagzania Blog

Months after our last post on this blog, you might think we’ve disappeared, but not, we’re still alive. Not publishing doesn’t mean Tagzania.com is abandoned. We’ve been doing some small improvements but our small company has been focused developing a new project: Mapapel, quality printable maps.

This new project uses OpenStreetMap’s data for creating the maps. OSM gives us a wide range of opportunities, such as editing the maps design

After launching Mapapel, we’re back to improve Tagzania.

Tagzania doesn’t want to deal with just one provider, that’s why we use Mapstraction, and specially OpenStreetMap. Until today, you had to add a new parameter to the URL to see your places in OSM, now it’s a little bit easier, you just need to click on the OpenStreetMap link (below the map, see the black box on the image).

The Forbidden city, Beijing, from GMaps to OSM:

Finally we’ve got some new icons in Tagzania. This was one of the requests from our users. These are the new categories:

• Castle
• Language
• Parking
• Police
• Port
• School
• University

There are also some changes in the way we select the icons for our places. We think there were too many things in the adding process. Now, after clicking in the “personalize your icon” link:

you’ll see all icon options in new layer:

Hope you like it, and, remember: keep telling us what you want in Tagzania!

This change has been done because of users like you, thanks a lot!

I’m back from my Camino after nearly 800 km with my bike and gathering a lot of interesting data: hostels, restaurants, churches, etc. Now starts the hard work, taking all the data to OpenStreetMap.

I’ve started with three interesting places every pilgrim should visit in the Way of St. James: Roncesvalles-Orreaga, O Cebreiro and Samos.

Roncesvalles – Orreaga before:

And after (see it in OSM):

O Cebreiro before:

and after (see it in OSM):

And, finally, Samos before mapping it:

and after (see it in OSM):

I gathered data from a lot of other places, but I need time to upload it to OpenStreetMap.

by Mikel Lizarralde

Last Friday we attended the Basque Android developers (and hackers) meeting, Etxekoandroid.

Etxekoandroid has been promoted by Juanan Pereira with the goal of creating a developer community around Android. The first meeting was held at the Korta building of the University of the Basque Country, in Donostia-San Sebastian.

We talked about the new firmwares and new works like Jesusfreke , TheDude’s , Haykuro and so. There were ideas about new apps and also some questions regarding to the future of Android.

We have created Tagzania Mobile, with the aim of working more and more on Android (and also other mobile platforms). Our first step is Tagzania’s Android app, which you can see a demo in the video below:

We’ll launch it soon and we’d like to attend the upcoming Android Developer Challenge.

Our users will be able to add new places and search for them in Tagzania.com wherever they are with this new app. Currently, we are working to integrate the GPS tracker so that we can send them to Tagzania.com.

We’ll keep on working on it.

Last weekend we attended the State of the Map annual conference in Amsterdam. Apart from taking part in the lightning talks we also sponsored the event. In our talk, we mentioned how we use OSM in Tagzania and we showed our new project Mapapel.

You can read some comments about Tagzania’s experience in the SOTM09 here.

The presentations and videos can be found in the SOTM wiki.

Tagzania’s new t-shirts have just arrived to our office. T-shirts have been designed by Zaldieroa, as brilliant as usual.

Hope you like it. You’ll have some news about these t-shirts soon.

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.

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