Our user Tricias has been very busy with the Thames Listening Walk - a multimedia tour along the Thames in London, with photos and sound recordings and videos.
Here is the ever-growing list of stories that encompass the walk:
Have fun exploring!
As part of a general bugfix release we’ve added also a small feature to the homepage:
When you roll over any of the place markers on the homepage, the site now displays randomly selected images from that place as icons that slowly fade away.
Other than that, today’s changes, while mostly invisible, give us a much healthier site.
MapSkip would like to welcome the Ute Meadows school! Thanks to the efforts of their adventurous students we have now placemarks for more than a dozen of the large volcanoes on this planet, many of them with great photos and facts about their history.
Thanks Ute Meadows! And keep on mapskipping!
It is time for a new MapSkip feature: Sounds of the World!
MapSkip is one of the very few (the only one?) mapping sites that allows users to upload sound recordings and it is a feature that we are very proud of - and now we have a new page to prominently showcase your sound recordings. To listen to the sound recordings, all you have to do is roll over the icons on the map - the Sounds of the World page only features stories with sound.
As you can tell from the map, there are still large areas of the world without sound recordings and we will need your help to change that - so if you have any sound recordings from your trips, just click on the map and create a new story to upload your MP3.
And please - as mentioned before on this blog, please only upload sound recordings you have created yourself.
We are more than happy to welcome TeachersFirst as a new partner to MapSkip. TeachersFirst is a free service that is dedicated to help teachers in finding appropriate online resources for the classroom.
TeachersFirst has already reviewed MapSkip a little while ago and we were very interested in their constructive comments about the site.
We have tried to make MapSkip a family friendly site from the very beginning and we are excited about the opportunity to work with TeachersFirst in making MapSkip a better tool for teachers.
After a long summer of traveling and - alas - working very hard, we are now going into our second MapSkip coding autumn…We have a long list of changes and updates we want to integrate into the site, but for a while you will only notice things going even smoother than normal. 
We have a couple of big features in the pipeline, but that will take a little while longer.
Let’s start with some technical changes:
As of right now we’ve updated our Google Maps libraries to the latest 2.x standard instead of the “old” 2.0 and we’ve changed all our code to use the new Google AJAX API loader. This has for now only minor consequences for you, but it makes our inner engineer very happy. Also, we can introduce new Google features much faster now.
And as a first new feature based on the new API loader - we use now Google’s new clientlocation feature, which means when a new user comes to MapSkip for the first time - or if a registered user comes back with a shiny new browser - MapSkip will take a guess at your location and open the map around your neighborhood.
A few days ago Google has again updated the Satellite views of the maps we are using here at MapSkip. The full list of updated or improved locations is too long to publish here since there are hundreds of cities from all over the world on the list, but some of the highlights are:
There also have been significant updates to many of the large cities in China and several North American cities like Vancouver, Dallas, Chicago and New York City.
Happy MapSkipping!
The first version of our automatic translation feature, while functional, was not much more than a hack into Google Translate. The site integration was problematic and not very user friendly.
But a few weeks ago Google opened an API to their translation engine and we jumped on this opportunity to finally improve this feature in MapSkip.
Here you can see the result of this development - the all-new story translation feature. The translations are now neatly integrated with the story panel in both map and story list view. And as a bonus feature it is now possible to display translations of a story into multiple languages at the same time!
The quality of the translations is of course still relatively uneven. It is very hard for a machine to understand all the nuances of human language and while the translations are generally helpful, they can still be quite entertaining and more often than not bewildering.
We see this feature very much as an investment into the future as we are confident that Google’s efforts will over time lead to translations nearly as good as from a human translator.
Until then, have fun with MapSkip’s story translations, even if the results may be just a little bit more poetic than intended…
You may notice a few small changes to how the site works while writing stories and comments - we’ve gone through some of the feedback we got and have made a few small bugfixes that will hopefully make your experience of MapSkip much better.
Specifically, there should be no more double- or even triple submits of your stories or comments. Please let us know if this works for you!
Happy MapSkipping!
MapSkip has reached the point where the number of stories on the homepage can be a little bit overwhelming! It’s a good problem to have, but still - it’s a problem.
To help with the hundreds of stories jostling for attention on the map, MapSkip now has a new feature on our homepage - Filter Places.
With Filter Places it is easy to review your own places and stories, to check in on the highest rated stories on the map or to follow along with the multimedia-rich stories that are now appearing on the site.
We are planning to enhance and expand the filter options even more in the near future, so stay tuned!