934 items (823 unread) in 13 feeds
Related tags: reuse [+], osm [+], openstreetmap [+], opencontent [+]
I'm happy to point to the announcement that Wikitravel Press now has a guide to Paris. Paris has long been a targeted city for Wikitravel Press, and I'm really happy we were able to get this book out. Bonus: the Wikitravel Guide to Paris includes maps from OpenStreetMap, the Open Content geo database and mapping system. We've got some new software to overlay Wikitravel listings onto the maps, and it's working really well. Thanks to OSM, editor Mark Jaroski, and managing editor Jani Patokallio for getting this great book out... just in time for Paris spring!
tags: wikitravel wikitravelpress paris guidebook opencontent openstreetmap
PodcastsI asked a couple of days ago (Journal/30 Germinal CCXVI) about podcasts on the subject of Open Source and Open Content. I wanted to summarize a few that came in through comments on my blog:
This has turned into a pretty decent list, but I'd love to see some more diverse discussion of Open Content and Open Source in general. Please, feel free to send more tips.
tags: podcast linux opensource opencontent
VinismoFor some reason Vinismo went over some tipping point with StumbleUpon this weekend, and we had a real flood of users from that bookmarking site. I can't say why that happens; I find SU to be a totally opaque Web site and service.
In other news, Stevey likes our business cards. Me too! I think they look great. M-C Doyon, the Montreal graphic designer who laid out our Web site, also did our paper branding, and I think she did a great job.
tags: vinismo stevey marieclaudedoyon cards
Yay Firefox 3.0I don't know when it happened, but Firefox 3.0 beta does non-ASCII characters in the address bar correctly. So, if you're reading this entry on my site with FF3, you'll see the é in "Floréal" rather than the URL-encoded "Flor%c3%a9al". I also like seeing Japanese Wikipedia pages in the address bar showing up correctly. Nice job, FF3 team.
tags: firefox firefox3 utf8 url
Planet software should preserve categoriesSo, apparently there's once again rising problems with content drift on Planet Debian. Personally, I think this is a problem with a technical solution.
All three main flavours of RSS support post categorization. Many, many kinds of feed software provide categories (see, for example, this feed). If the Planet software would preserve these categories and pass them through to the output RSS feeds, then people who really only want to read about Debian could filter the output feeds for category "debian". People who wanted to know about other parts of their fellow Debianistas' lives would just leave the feeds unfiltered.
I'm not sure if the Planet software doesn't support categories in output at all, or if it's just an option that's turned off on Planet Debian. If nobody else wants to take a look, I can look into making this work. It seems like a pretty simple fix.
tags: planet planetdebian rss categories
I'm really pleased to announce here that one of the projects Maj and I have been working on for a long time has finally come to fruition. Today Wikitravel Press launched its first two Open Content printed guidebooks -- Wikitravel Chicago and Wikitravel Singapore.
When we started Wikitravel back in 2003 (!), our sincere hope was that at some point in the future, people would be able to carry Wikitravel guidebooks with them on a trip. I think that mobile technology is excellent, and it's amazing how much you can read on a cell phone or PDA these days. But there's still something so convenient about a printed guidebook: it never runs out of batteries; you don't need an uplink to read it; you don't have to worry about it getting stolen because you flashed it out in the wrong café or restaurant.
To be honest, I thought that one of the "traditional" guidebook publishers would step in and use Wikitravel content in their guides. But that didn't happen, and along with our partner Jani Patokallio, Maj and I decided to start a publishing company ourselves. Thus Wikitravel Press, and our first two books.
We have a number of other books in the pipeline, and our hope is to have a few dozen available by the end of the year, and a few hundred by the end of the following year. I'm working on the Wikitravel guide to Montreal, and Maj and I are collaborating on Buenos Aires. We're taking a 6-week trip to Argentina in February/March, so this should be a great time for research.
I heartily encourage any writers or editors who are interested in working on travel books to contact Wikitravel Press about your ideas of bringing Wikitravel content to print. I think this is a great opportunity for people who want to encourage Open Content, or who want to get into the travel writing field, or who just love the idea of wikis-to-books.
tags: wikitravel wikitravelpress travel guidebook singapore chicago