MapOfStrange News - News from the MapOfStrange

We’ve had a spate of people adding things to the site that are just, well, crap.  Originally I was just going to let everything onto the site, but then the site got full of people’s houses, and the odd badly positioned marker showing where ‘France’ or ‘India’ were.  The worst part of these were that most of them pointed in that general area, rather than being the actual country.  Who says that kids today are poorly edumacated?  After seeing this, I quickly made new entries go to a holding page that only I could see, and then I could verify these, making sure that the really crap ones didn’t get through.  However, the success of the site has meant that loads of new entries are being added every day.  And unfortunately, 99% of these are junk.  So I thought I’d give my top five things that people shouldn’t be adding but do.

1. Their home

We get loads of these.  Idiots every last one of them.  I’ll quote the homepage “you might be surprised that nobody wants to know where you live, but hey, we don’t!”.  Get the message?  Are you interested where I live?  I’m honestly not interesting enough to stalk, so I hope the answer is no.  And are you interested that a bloke from France lives in Marseille?  It’s hardly ground breaking stuff that’s going to set the world alight is it?  We get these every day.  It accounts for about 20% of all entries added.  Have a look at these from the past few days.

This is a typical example.  They’ve found their house, and told us about it.  It’s not in the least bit exciting or interesting.

We get them in all languages - this on is Spanish, but we get them in French as well (Chez).

This one is one of my favourites.  ‘I think’ this is where I live?  What?  How can you not know?  I zoomed in and it was basically a field.  WTF?

2. Random clicking in the middle of nowhere

We get a lot of this.  They usually put gibberish into the box.  I have a feeling that most of them panic when they click and the form pops up.  This is a message to you - if the form pops up and you don’t want to submit something, don’t click the button.  It’s not difficult.  If you don’t click the button, you won’t add anything!  Here are some examples.  Bright sparks the lot of them.

This is a good one - they’ve clicked from a long, long way out and obviously not known what to do when the add marker form popped up.

These have zoomed right in, but with no explanation I have no idea what it is.

And again, there’s no explanation but they are so far away that it is impossible to tell what it is.

3. Adding a new entry instead of adding a comment

 These are oddballs.  There is a perfectly good mechanism for adding comments to an entry, yet a lot of people insist on putting a new marker on the map, in exactly the same place to make a comment.  This is all well and good, but there is not real correlation between your entry and the other, and as such your comment gets lost forever.  I rarely approve a record if it’s already in there (it’s only really if I forget), so I’ll just delete your comment and it will be lost - tough.  Here is a classic example:

It would be a perfectly good comment.  However, it’s now been lost forever because this dumass didn’t scroll down the page.

4. Clicking on the join…

Google earth isn’t one continuous photo.  It’s a collection of hundreds, thousands, millions of pictures, and often these are taken at different times of day, with different resolution cameras.  That’s why you often find squares of shadow, or areas where the two different resolutions show up.  I used to include some of these because they were relatively interesting.  However, now I need there to be something else.  For example, if the two joins don’t match up and you see the road going off in two directions or a road that looks like it hasn’t been finished, or you can see the text at the end of the roll of film, or two buildings look like they are collapsing in on one another because they have been photographed from different angles.  That is cool, seeing one part of the photo in shade and one in sunlight is just boring.  here are examples of ‘people who have clicked on the join’

 This person added 6 different ‘weird Ireland’ submissions.  None of which were at all weird. This is just the join between a high res picture and a low res picture.

No it isn’t.  Did they teach grammar, spelling and punctuation in your school?

Erm, no.

5. Trying to be funny, but coming across as a bit thick.

We get a lot of this.  Most of them aren’t worth a mention.  They are infuriating.  I think that pictures are better than words in explaining what I mean by these people.

 Yes, he actually though this was funny…

Small object in the water?  Could that be a … boat?  10 points.  Give yourself a gold star.

Erm, could it be the side of a road?

Erm, no.  That’s something we call snow.  It’s white and falls from the sky in winter.

Yes.  Just not a very interesting one.

So there you have it.  That’s a collection of some of the stupid things put onto this collection of stupid things.  The problem is that they have been added by stupid people.  Thanks to those of you who have added good stuff, and thanks to those of you who have added things like this - you’ve given me a laugh, if only at your stupidity.

Welcome to the new ‘news’ section of the MapOfStrange website.

This section is going to be used to keep our visitors up to date with what’s happening on the site, what’s happening with Google Maps and Google Earth, and to highlight some of the weird, wonderful and totally bizarre things that people have found in Google Maps and Google Earth.

So first off, what’s going on with the site?

Well, as you might now be aware, there is a news section…  You should be aware, you’re reading it.  The site has also moved to a new server, a new domain name and I’ve added a lot more functionality to the site.

So what about the domain name?

MapOfStrange.com used to be scitor.co.uk.  This was a domain name that I have owned for years.  It was originally purchased to conduct research on for my dissertation into search engine optimization, but after graduating that site became redundant and I used the domain for, erm, well not a lot really.  I started looking at the Google Maps API, and set up a site where you could store strange things.  I stuck it on scitor.co.uk because I’m a bit tight (being from Yorkshire) and didn’t want to fork out ten whole pounds on a relevant domain name. 

Scitor.co.uk grew and grew until it became too big for my poor little free webhosting account.  Since March scitor.co.uk was taken down by the hosts on several occasions for exceeding the maximum server load allowed (at one point it was three times the limit).  At the beginning of June I realised that this wasn’t good enough and moved to a paid host.  As part of the hosting deal I was offered a new domain name and selected ‘googlearound.com’.  “That’s strange,” I hear you say, “this is mapofstrange.com, not googlearound.com”.  Well my hosts refused to register googlearound.com - apparantly it breached copyright.  So I had to choose a domain name very quickly and the first I found that was relevant (and didn’t contain the word google) was mapofstrange.com.  Not my first choice, but I’m starting to warm to it.

So what about the additional functionality? 

Well, you have been able to browse by tags for a while now, but some of the visitors who haven’t seen the site for a few months might not have seen that part of it.  Basically, new entries are tagged, and you can browse through those tags - clicking on a tag lists all the entries tagged with that keyword, and all the other tags associated with it.  I think it’s quite neat, but you might disagree. 

I’ve also added a way of ranking entries - click on the tick to vote for an entry, and the cross to vote against it.  You can sort by rating as well, which is the number of positive votes minus the number of negative.  This puts the most popular entries at the top of the page, and might be a good starting point for new visitors, as it guarantees that the really cool stuff comes at the top of the list. 

Oh, And you can add comments.  Just fill in the comments form, and it will add a comment.  Simple really, but you’d be amazed how many people add a new map record instead.

And I’ve fixed some of the bugs from Firefox.  So it should work in IE or Firefox.  I’ve not tried it in Safari because I haven’t got a Mac.  If anyone is willing to buy me one to test the site, send me an email - paul@mapofstrange.com, and I’ll be happy to make sure it works.