Going Plazes

One of the more interesting presenters at BlogTalk last July was Mikel Maron discussing integrating geographical information with new media technologies like blogs. An interesting experiment during that conference was an annotated map of Vienna, where we as visitors could add info to the map through a Moveable Type blog. The blogged info got integrated in a map.

Mikel painted pictures of adding geographical information to a whole range of other stuff. This would help in overlaying our cybernetworks over the geographical world around us, making them more part of eachother. One of the reasons I think that is interesting is because I think it works towards building a Cybercity.

And now there is Plazes. Siegfried Hirsch already alerted me to it a while back, and today I saw Lilia Efimova posting about it, so I dug up Siegfrieds invitation and went to Plazes:

(somehow it does not always show the javascript plugin above...)

Plazes is still in beta, but let's see what it can do.
Of course as with most of these services I have one problem with them: yet another central server to store my data on.

During a micro-content dinner with Marc Canter last month in Amsterdam we discussed these type of issues. Marc is working hard to bring developers and others together precisely so that distributed services (think FOAF like stuff) at least can understand eachothers data-formats. That is the way to get these more bottom-up oriented tools more useful. And it's important that it does, for I want to have the data that I share through these services on my own server, under my own full control. Plazes, YASNS and other can then come and have that data collected by software agents.

But apparantly for developers it's the easy road (and also probably the one with the more obvious/old fashioned industrial businessmodels) to build another centralized structure that requires me to bring data to them, instead of them coming around to collect data at my place.

Despite this little rant, I went over to Plazes and registered of course...... you'll find me there as ton_zylstra