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.
