Stickymap Blog

Over the last few weeks, we have been looking for teachers who would be interested in testing our community organization toolbox. The tool allows community organizations to create custom maps of their neighborhoods, share their maps with their community of users, and embed the maps on their websites. One group that we feel may wish to use the website are school teachers. We believe that school teachers who want to encourage their students to learn about their neighborhoods and develop strong writing and interviewing skills might be interested in creating a custom map together. Students would interview local residents about a location, write a short article, and upload photos to the website. The class can then create a custom map that they will be able to share with their peers. We do not believe that there is an easier and more exciting way to learn about geography!

If you’re interested in volunteering to beta test our community organization tool in your classroom, please let us know!

Dan

For the last few weeks, we have been refining the Community Organization custom mapping tool, that allows non-profits, community groups, associations, and societies to create custom maps of their neighborhoods. The tool will allow groups to share maps with their community members, and will provide an interactive interface for the groups to demonstrate their group’s impact. The map can easily be embedded in websites by copying a snippet of html code. If you are interested in joining our group of beta testers in creating maps for your project, please contact us.

It’s been a long time since we’ve discussed the sifter – if we’ve ever discussed it here at all.  The seemingly mysterious feature to new users was introduced on our site last summer.  It has turned out to be a fun way to view markers on the map, and it’s usefulness grows as the site itself grows.

The sifter allows you to immediately see every marker posted with a certain icon.  For example, if you want to see all the ice cream places posted in the country, just open the sifter and select “ice cream”.  If there are too many ice cream places, you may have to zoom in, but once you do that they will all come into view, and you won’t have to zoom in any further to find them.

As the number of markers on our site grows (10.5K at the moment), the sifter will become a more powerful tool when there are too many markers to “view all” and too wide a range to search.  The sifter also gives us a quick visual sample of how densely populated with markers an area has become, and where certain icons are being more frequently posted.

Max

This morning, I received a second email from one of our users describing how some of his links that he had placed on Wikipedia to specific Stickymap markers were being considered spam. I was surprised, and after checking some links that he forwarded, it appears as though a Wikipedia administrator has recommended that Stickymap, a social action community building project, be placed on a special list! Stickymap has been accused of using Wikipedia to promote our website. As a policy, we do not spam websites or engage in abusive linking practices.

We’re very surprised, as plenty of other Google map driven applications do not seem to be under their microscope. Right now, we’re trying to do what we can to prevent Stickymap from being placed on this list, as it does not seem right to punish the entire Stickymap community for one user’s poor (questionable) behavior. We just hope that the administrator will be reasonable and understanding.