Di-Ann Eisnor of Platial on crowdsourcing maps.

Crowdsourcing information through collaborative maps

John Eischeid interviews Di-Ann Eisnor from Platial

Di-Ann Eisnor is founder and CEO of Platial, her third start-up. The mapping site allows users to upload their own information and tag it to a specific location. She and her husband Jason trace the genesis of the idea to the time they spent living in Amsterdam and needed to help their guests find their way around. "We made them maps, like everyone does, of the basic neighborhood amenities," Platial says on its about page "We ended up with a kitchen drawer stuffed full of these notes. It was our collection of Places, plus menus for take out, magazine articles listing kid friendly museums, schedules of parades, and a few brochures and tour books for attractions that seemed interesting enough. A few maps got lost, loaned out or recombined, others got photocopied or emailed or taped to front doors as invitations. Then we moved back to the United States, and that drawer of Places lost its context, it became useless in Portland. We wanted a way to preserve all that knowledge in a powerful, useful, contextual way."
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John Eischeid: Where does the word Platial come from?

Di-Ann Esinor: It was originally going to be the private entrance, but all of the normal sounding domain names were taken.

Q: Do you have plans to enable the layering of data, rather than limiting it to points?

A: Our current infrastructure supports data input by anyone in the form of feeds, CSV or manual place adding (lat/long, business listings, address). Our primary focus is on enabling people to put whatever they want on a map. Have you played with the slider? It displays geographically relevant information from the Platial community, Yahoo! Local, Flickr and others. It collects and serves relevant geographic content across many sources onto maps.

Q: Do you edit or otherwise police the entries?

A: We don't edit them at all, but users can flag entries. We've scaled so much that it's getting harder to keep track of them. Out of millions of entries, we only pulled two things off of the site.

Q: Has there been any vandalism of public maps, such as the problems Wikipedia has had?

A: Not to our knowledge. Nothing like that has been flagged by the community. There are 20,000+ sites using the Platial platform. Each of those Mapmakers can choose the level of the openness for their own maps with built-in functionality that allows people to approve postings, comments and redistribution.

Q: How easy has it been to work with Google (both the Maps and the Earth applications)? There are a lot of variations on their maps, and people are even working on rendering portions of Berlin in 3D with select interiors. Have you considered enabling something similar?

A: Base maps are not the main thing for us. The main thing is the information people are putting on top of it and how that facilitates community and discovery of the world. Communities of interest have formed around sailing, architecture, parenting and so much more. Working with Google has been great -- we could easily start on the aspects of the product we thought were important because of their offering. We also have a partnership with Friendster using Yahoo Maps and have an application running on (Microsoft's) Virtual Earth. As long as our information can be viewed across the board, that's ideal.

Q: What's next? People can add text, but do you see something like a YouTube hybrid that allows people to upload movies and then tag them to a point on the map?

A: There is actually a site which launched recently just for video -- its neat. Many of our existing points have video integrated through embed tags etc. Video upload is not something we've built into the code.

Q: There was a huge spread in the New York press last week about how all the good neighborhoods are gone, disappearing under tides of gentrification and revelers in from out-of-town. Have you gotten any complaints from people who think that some information should not be shared?

A: There hasn't been a lot a noise about this on Platial. People here have wanted to share and discover. We don't have privacy yet, but we've been thinking about if from the beginning. Neighborhoods, like people, are in flux- constantly evolving and changing shape. Hopefully services like our will help expose some of this so people can navigate around the world in ways that are personally relevant. < a href="http://www.dangillmor.com/">Dan Gillmor from Berkeley is doing wonderful work related to this topic.

(Edited by John Abell)

Jeff wrote up a pretty good overview of the site. After poking around myself, I've come up with the questions below for Di-Ann. (I'm not sure I'll ask the few at the end.) Any suggestions? Have I missed anything? I hope to interview her on Wednesday.

Where does the word Platial come from?

Do you have plans to enable the layering of data, rather than limiting it to points?

Do you edit or otherwise police the entries?

Has there been any vandalism of public maps, such as the problems Wikipedia has had?

How easy has it been to work with Google (both the Maps and the Earth applications)? There are a lot of variations on their maps, and people are even working on rendering portions of Berlin in 3D with select interiors. Have you considered enabling something similar?

What's next? People can add text, but do you see something like a YouTube hybrid that allows people to upload movies and then tag them to a point on the map? That would be a great way to share vacations.

I noticed you and your husband had this idea a while ago. Were you ever planning in trying to build it from the ground up, without using a third-party mapping technology?

There was a huge spread in the New York Press last week about how all the good neighborhoods are gone, disappearing under tides of gentrification and weekend revelers in from out of town. Have you gotten any complaints from people who think that some information should not be shared?

On your blog, you posted the Gardar Eide Einarsson photo, The World Is Yours. Was that somehow inspirational?

A little off topic, but why Portland?

You haven't been around long. Has your response been what you expected?

What was the most difficult aspect of the project?

How does Platial differentiate itself from another "neighborhood" site or write up?

I just spent about thirty to forty-five minutes poking around the Platial website. Basically, Platial allows its users to, first, plot points on a Google map, then add information, like a short description or photo, about each point, and finally share their map on their blog or MySpace page.

According to Platial's About Page, "The specific concept for building an online, shared mapping tool came after Di-Ann and I had moved to Amsterdam in 2004. We encouraged a lot of people to come visit, to stay with us, to hang out. But we had to work, deal with the kids, etc, and couldn't be tour guides all day long." And that's all the site is really used for. The front page mostly includes maps of locations of user's favorite bars, or places they fell off their bike, or stops on a recent trip. Here's a good example: Civil Rights Geography.

Most of the maps I found on the site were personal, like maps of trip stops. But, crowdsourcing can be used on the maps. When you first create a map, you can choose to make it open to other users to add information. That way a group of people can add locations they are interested in, and share a story about each site with text, photos, and video.

You can add information by either typing in an address, or from importing a spreadsheet (.csv files only, but is nice if you had a ton of information), or from a blog (I couldn't figure out how that worked). You can't just drag a point onto the map.

While the site is nice for sharing your personal information about points of interest in your town, I found a few major drawbacks to it being a truly useful crowdsourcing tool. Say you're working with a group on a local political campaign. The group goes from door to door and asks people who they plan on voting for in the upcoming election. Everyone puts their information into a spreadsheet, including address, and voting intent (No names for privacy). With normal Geographic Information Systems programs, like ArcView or MapInfo, you could geocode (plot them on a street map) the addresses with a different color point for who the person at that address intends to vote for. So, say blue points are people who intend to vote for your candidate and red points are people who intend to vote for your opponent. After looking at the finished map, you could see what neighborhoods are more likely to vote for your opponent, and target those areas for your campaign. The goal being to turn all the red points into blue points. Platial only has four different point type available (Blue, red, green, and orange diamonds). Blue is "My Places," orange is "Platial," red is points with "images," and green is "Biz listings." You can't change them.

The second problem is you can't layer information. You can only plot points, and you can't have a map that, say, can compare income data between census tracts. A good map that combines both points and area data is one David Cohn brought up called Healthcare that Works. It shows race data combined with hospital closing data.

The power in mapping comes when you can put complicated information, like census data, into a beautiful, easy to understand, visual. Platial doesn't have that kind of power. But if you want to make a map, for your out-of-town friends, of bars with more than 20 beers on tap, then you're in luck.