We (Kazumi & Thomas) flew out to Idaho Falls today and we’ll be on a road trip down through Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico for the next ten days.

It’s not certain that we will have connectivity in a lot of the places on the way, but we will try and write some stories to take you all along on our trip. I will link to these stories from this post, so watch this space!

It is now easier to find stories with sound recordings in the Stories section of the site - look out for a small version of this icon to the right of the headlines in the list view.

Of course, now we need more recordings on the site…

This is only slightly related to MapSkip, but it’s one of those cool things I just have to talk about:

The “Competing Chinese Operas” audio recording that I have posted here as part of a story about Chinatown, has been listed on the Travel + Leisure website in an article called “A World of Sound” as one of their ten picks from the Quiet American web site.

If you have a chance, take a moment and explore the recordings offered at these two sites. Many of these recordings are wonderful short vacations for tired ears and minds.

Sound recordings can now be uploaded as part of a story. You can add one recording as MP3 of up to 2MBytes (usually between one and two minutes) to a story. If a recording exists for a story, it will play automatically when a user opens the full story view and the sound will repeat when it reaches the end.

Here are two examples of stories with sound: Competing Chinese Opera and Mountain Water.

We hope to hear many recordings of ambient sound from places all around the world, but I’m sure you will find other uses for this feature. Maybe a short spoken word piece? We can’t wait to see & hear what you come up with!

However, the MapSkip team would like to point out our no-tolerance policy on copyright infringement - please DO NOT upload copyrighted music. We’d hate to lose a user over something like that.

Here’s one feature that we’ve offered since the site launch but which hasn’t been used much yet: A place can hold more than one story. When you open an existing place mark (not just your own), you can always add a new story with the link at the bottom of the current story list.

Here is a place mark on 111 Sutter Street in San Francisco where you can already see multiple stories in one place.

We expect to do some very cool things with this feature in the future, when we have enough stories and photos for some of the places to create interactive timelines…

When you search for places via the Map Search, the result on the map is not just right in the center, but is now also marked with a little arrow. The arrow will stick around while you zoom and pan the map and will only disappear if you do another search or leave the page.

The map display had an unfortunate bug if the dateline was visible - all the hands disappeared from the map! This bug has been fixed, so feel free to explore the map all across the Pacific Ocean.

More new features are on the way!

New for today are the machine translation services from Google Translate, which are now available in the Map and the Story view. Click the “Full Story” link, and under the story next to the “Send to a friend” link you can find this new feature.

The translation happens in a new window and you will have to chose the languages yourself… for now. We are working on a tool to help you to identify the language you are looking at, but that may take a little while before we add it to the translation popup.

OK, one more for today: We got a great post on the Teaching Sagittarian. In the post, the author is bringing up some really good points about using MapSkip in the class room. After reading the post we have to say - we LOVE that idea.

If anybody has ideas on how to make MapSkip more class room friendly, please let us know either here or through the Contact page.

KillerStartups gave us a really great review. Sure made us happy!