Concharto now allows you to easily add and delete points from any place on a line or shape.
* To add a point, simply drag one of the “shadow” squares that you see in between the solid white squares.
* To delete a point, simply click on it.
A few new features went live this weekend:
1. Export to Google Earth. In the search results there is a new kml link on the upper left. If you have a virtual globe browser like Google Earth or MS Virtual Earth, you can now use this link to import your search results into it. Click on this link:
And if you have installed Google Earth or similar, it will load the search results right into Google Earth like this:
2. New Terrain Map Type. Concharto now has a new map type called Terrain. To see it, click on the “Ter” button on the upper left of the screen.
This map style is great for historic events because it minimizes modern geographic features such as roads and metropolitan areas and stresses terrain features such as elevation and climate.
3. New Icons Concharto finally has its own map icons 
. An icon has been added to the info window to help you to associate lines and shapes (which don’t have labels) to the left hand time-line pane.
A few improvements to the search results page have gone live this week.
You can now hide the timeline sidebar to show more of the map. Just click “hide sidebar” near the upper left of the page. To show the side bar again, click “show”.
The timeline is now hidden, so how can you follow the events on the map in sequential order? The info balloons now have a next/previous that lets you do that.
I periodically get comments like this one from a Wikipedian whom I respect, “… how would one accommodate changes in geography and man-made features as you go back in time?”
The frivolous answer is “we don’t do that.” Accommodating changes in geography, including cityscapes, roads and terrain, is the domain of Historical Cartography, an art form that requires a great deal of skill, talent and access to archival maps. I know people who are expert practitioners in historical cartography - Concharto can’t do what they do.
But this is not a problem because Concharto is about placing past events relative to each other and to today’s geography. For instance, the Battle of Thermopylae was fought along a track that was right over the water. Today, that area is several miles from Greek coastline. Concharto just shows its location on today’s map.
But this doesn’t mean we Concharto editors can’t use historical cartography. A great example is the timeline of the New York Draft Riots of the American Civil War.
Many of the events mentioned in the textual references call out places like “The Colored Orphanage on 5th Avenue.” That property hasn’t existed for years, but you can find its location using a map from David Rumsey Historical Maps (above). That city block looks like this today:
I’m happy to report that I’ll be demonstrating Concharto at this year’s Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco on May 12. My presentation is “How to Make a Geographic Wiki.” I’ll use events and timelines from the map to illustrate all the important features of Concharto.
I’ll definitely show them“The Play.” As John Madden would say, “he goes left, he goes right, Boom!” I bet I’ll irritate some Stanford grads but, hey, it’s just a demo.
Here is an event I would have never considered doing, but it just awesome. The author has created a timeline of The Play, the famous game winning play between Stanford and University of California, Berkeley, November 20, 1982. With four seconds left in the game, the Golden Bears used five lateral passes to win the game.
In his own words :
Have you ever been thinking, man, I really want a dorky map of The Play, even though I have the video saved on YouTube, can watch it on any classic sports highlights reel, can see reenactments at almost any Golden Bear event? Of course you haven’t. That’s exactly why I decided to make one. You can never have enough of The Play.
Here’s a summary of some of the recent improvements to Concharto:
1. trust people
2. make sure anything anyone does, can be undone rather easily
3. let people be administrators, and trust them
We’ve changed our name from Time Space Map to Concharto. I hope you like the new name.
A lot has happened since we launched a few months ago. We’ve attracted a worldwide audience, gotten plenty of favorable reviews, been nominated for a prestigious award and have added lots of new features.
I have been surprised at how quickly the word has spread to other countries. We have contributors from all over, including the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Spain and Argentina to name a few.
Reviewers who have taken a look at Concharto have had good things to say. For instance, Ed Parsons, Google’s Geospatial Technologist, said “…This is not the first example of this type of web application, but the first in my knowledge to really exploit the potential of the community at a global level to contribute..“. And Stefan Geens of OgleEarth Blog said “… I was born way too early:-) I love the sudden burst of potential and opportunity an innovative site like this brings about…”
We have also been nominated for the Austria-based 2008 Prix Ars Electronica award in the Digital Communities category. The Prix Ars Electronica (like the Oscars of electronic media) is a highly regarded international juried competition with awards in seven categories. Past winners include Wikipedia in 2004.
Of the 250 million people that use Wikipedia each month, only a small fraction ever contribute to an article. By my calculation (see this essay for details), only 1 in 1000 people contribute. This means if you know two or more people who regularly contribute to Wikipedia, you are defying the odds.
If you were to equate the populations of countries of the world to various Wikipedia groups, here’s what it would look like:
A Mature base and a clean slate
Wikipedia has a mature, massive base of useful information, so there is something for everyone. Those 999 out of 1000 can find the information they are looking for and that 1 in 1000 person can help make the information better.
There is every reason to suppose that this same 1:1000 ratio holds for Concharto, since our goals and methods are quite similar. Concharto, however, doesn’t yet have much information for those other 999 people. This means we are mostly interesting to the one-in-a-thousand people. This same thing happened at Wikipedia when it first started out and is one reason why it took two or three years before anyone had heard of Wikipedia (it has been around since 2002).
One in a Thousand
So if you are a one-in-a-thousand contributor, I would like to hear from you. What types of new features do you want? What isn’t working for you? How can we make Concharto better?
Contact me at frank (at) concharto(dot) com - or leave feedback on our feedback form.
(Updated 4/28/08 - changed name from timespacemap to concharto)
When Leo Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace” in the 1860’s, he sprinkled it with whole chapters of rants against the historians of the day. His complaint was that they viewed history solely as a progression of major events precipitated by “great men”. Instead, he argued, history is a much more complicated progression of cause and effect driven by small events. In one of his more philosophical moments, he proposed applying the scientific method to history, asserting that a complete understanding of an event could be obtained by slicing that event into smaller and smaller pieces, in exactly the same way that a math student performs integral calculus.
While not actually creating a calculus of history, Concharto does attempt to slice history into smaller pieces. There are three recent technological advances that make this possible:
Hopefully, Concharto will one day be a comprehensive repository of thin slices of notable events from every place and time.
How can that happen? Concharto is a Geographic Wiki. It looks like Google Maps and works like Wikipedia. It has the all of the illustrative power Google Maps and all of the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia.
Unlike virtually all other mapping sites on the internet today, Concharto is not about places - it is about events. Unlike Wikipedia, it is about small discrete bits of information, rather than comprehensive articles.
Perhaps someday, Tolstoy’s idea can finally be realized…
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A Concharto of the expansion of the Inca Empire of South America.
(Updated 4/28/08 - changed timespacemap to concharto)
