Panoramic Earth meets Stumbleupon.com

Every once in a while an event catches your eye, and causes you to look a little further. This was our experience recently with Stumbleupon.com. Suddenly, like an exploding supernova lighting up the night sky, the referrals from this site flashed upon our web logs. It has been interesting watching the development and demise of this traffic source over the recent weeks. There are always a few sources of traffic that you get used to seeing. A couple of our regulars for us include both Flybirdy.com and Britainexpress.com, both of which regularly shine in our traffic sky, and both were equally eclipsed by Stumbleupon in recent days. Yet as Stumbleupon fades away in the traffic skies, both Flybirdy and Britainexpress grow brighter and brighter.

Sadly, like all supernovae, this brightening of our web life seems to have vanished as quickly as it came, leaving only an afterglow in our memories as we wonder where these inter-site travellers have gone to next. All that we can say is that we wish you well in your travels, thank you for coming by in such numbers. Maybe one day another new cluster of Stumbleupon members will burst upon our horizons again. At that point we at PanoramicEarth.com will have to change our analogy here from a supernova to a commet. Until then...

So, so long and thanks for all the clicks.
And may all your browsers always paginate.

Tagzania

Our Tagzania experiment:


Tagzania, a site that allows users to put points onto a Google Map location database and then add a comment and reference tags to it. Anyone who has used del.icio.us will be used to tags for web pages. These act as your own labels for your stored information. However, these tags effectively form part of a searchable database of information that allows other users to find your entries.

As an experiment, Panoramic Earth entered map points for the images we have taken in London. A sample of a Tagzania map is shown above. Each of the markers will give a little more information about the location itself. This has been useful as we have been able to collect the geomaping data on the way through, which will hopefully be used in a future development of the Panoramic Earth site.

More Panoramic Earth Tagzania locations.

Jungfrau Ski Region 2006

In January Panoramic Earth undertook a project in the Jungfrau region of Switzerland to construct an interactive tour of the area. This was challenging for a number of reasons, not least because of the need to carry around camera equipment while skiing, the potential effects of cold on the equipment and the rapid changes in weather conditions that can occur on the mountains. This resulting tour covers most of the skiing area around Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen, Mürren and Wengen. This includes Kleine Scheidegg, Mürren-Schilthorn and Männlichen skiing sections of the Jungfrau. There are about 70 panoramic images which give a good impression of the slopes and surrounding mountains. The North Face of the Eiger and the peak of Jungfraujoch features prominently in many of them.

Special features of this tour include:

• The starting point of the Men’s World Cup 2006 Final shot during the race on the last day.
• Views from the platform behind the Piz Gloria restaurant, situated at the top of the Schilthorn and the set for Blofeld’s lair in the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty`s Secret Service.
• Views covering the villages of Lauterbrunnen, Murren and Wengen.
• Spectacular views from the tops of the Männlichen, Lauberhorn and Schilthorn mountains
• Views of both the start and finish points of the infamous Inferno Race.

We have also featured a number of hotels in the towns that serve this area, which are set in the glorious surroundings of one of Europes’ finest examples of U-vallyes, hanging valleys and other results of glaciation. Panoramic Earth would like to thank the Wengen Mürren tourist board for their support and sponsorship in creating this tour. Ironically, as this is being written, it is now snowing in London. As always, this tour is available for other sites to use, so we hope you enjoy it.

Creation of PanoramicEarth.com

Both The London Map and The Hawaii Map used to have their own domains. It has now been decided to create one site to house both these and other tours as they are made. Thus was born PanoramicEarth.com. Soon after this other locations like Oxford in England and the Balearic Island of Mallorca off the South of Spain were also added. The site now attracts around 3,000 visitors a day, and this is growing month by month. New tours are continuing to be added during the coming year. I intend to visit at least 6 cities, probably mostly in Europe, though New York and Las Vegas are also under consideration depending on funds. There is also a possibility of Hong Kong being added to the collection.

One of the beauties of the whole project is that the tours may be used by other websites as embedded content, so don’t be too surprised if you come across the tours in other places and think, “That looks familiar…”. The London, Mallorca and Hawaii tours are also displayed in over 80 other websites as of February 2006. You will know it is a Panoramic Earth tour due to the presence of an acknowledgement sating “Tour by PanoramicEarth.com, powered by MAI Technology” underneath the tour itself.

Panoramic Earth also contains a growing number of European ski resorts using the same principle of panoramic images linked to (in this case) a piste map of the skiing region. There are around 30 listed to date, and the Jungfrau region in Switzerland was photographed extensively in January 2006 and is about to go live on the site. Each tour is also accompanied by local resort information useful for skiers and snow boarders alike.

So, take a browse, let your fingers do the clicking and see what some of these places have to offer.

London Oyster Card

For those travelling to London you will probably have noticed two things:



1) The cash price of a single fare on the tube (zone1) or bus is now quite expensive (£3.00 and £1.50 respectively)
2) There is a thing called an Oyster card that makes travel a lot cheaper.
A full list of prices can be found on Pages 9 and 10 of the TfL-fares-2006 pdf doccument.

Among the types of Oyster card is a ‘Pay as You Go’ card. These can be obtained at a tube station and then topped up via cash or credit at any time. As they are used, the price of the journey is deducted from the Oyster card. An advantage of this is that the fare prices are a lot less (£1.50 and £0.80 in the examples given above). They are also capped meaning that if you travel enough to have paid the equivalent of a day travel pass for the area you are using then that is it, you pay no more.

There is a £3.00 deposit payable on the Oyster card when you first get it. This is refunded when the card is handed back in if you have registered the card.

Is this useful for Visitors?
This all sounds like a great idea for visitors to London, who can get an Oyster card at the beginning of their journey and then hand it back in at the end. However, I have just been informed by the Oyster refund helpdesk (Sunday 12th Feb 2006) that the refund is posted to you as a cheque in £GB to the address used to register the card. There is no means for getting the refund of credit on the card or the deposit at the station. One would have thought that it would make sense to be able to get the card at Heathrow, for example, use it whilst in London and then return it back at Heathrow as you leave, picking up the deposit and credit on the way out. Sorry this is not going to work so easily. Your cheque will be sent to you in a number of weeks. This is the official line that I got from TfL helpdesk, though there seems to be conflicting evidence elsewhere to sugges that you can get your money back there and then.

Oyster not Compatible with Rail Network
The whole of the London network consists of the Tube, bus, Docklands Light Railway (DLR), Trams and Overground Rail systems. The Pay as you Go Oyster card is useable on all the above except (most of) the Rail system. Specific journeys are allowed, but they are few and far between.

Needless to say, this frustrates Londoners a lot and is because the readers for the two networks are incompatible, and for some reason, when the rest of the country went for one system, London opted for another (Yes, I know it makes perfect sense – not!). Now there seems to be a bit of a ‘discussion’ going on over who is likely to pay for the conversion / installation needed to make things compatible. Ken Livingstone and Transport for London (TfL) has suggested that the rail networks pay, with them indicating a certain obvious degree of unwillingness to foot the bill for TfL decision.

Another good point about the Oyster system is that if you use enough travel to have paid for a travel card for the day, then your payments are automatically capped to that cost no matter how much more travelling you do. Be warned though, that even though a daily travel card would cover the whole of the London network, the capped Oyster card can still NOT be used on mainline train journeys in the zone because of the incompatibility of the systems!

As yet there is no indication as to when / if this is going to be addressed.

So, a potentially really useful tool for the tourist probably rendered mostly useless (or harmless) do to the complexities and variances within the systems. For those of you not fully confused or asleep up to this point, further information can be waded through on. Personally I feel that the system should be made more visitor friendly re both the refunding system and compatiblity with the whole network, and maybe you would like to contact TfL and tell them so!

Opera in the house

A week ago I went to Papagano Restaurant near to Covent Garden in London. This seems to be a place you either love or hate, the decoration is opulent, using loads of fabrics, and at times bizarre. The food is great, and the whole event can feel quite theatrical, which is no mistake. The reason I was there was to see two friends sing. The are both opera singers, Louise Kleboe a mezzo-voice and Russell Ixer, a Lyric Tenor. It was great fun, with both of them roaming the restaurant singing arias during the evening. They have finished the run of events on the 22nd December 2005, but I hope they are able to do some more in 2006. It always makes a change to hear live music in any restaurant, but to hear quality live opera is rare.

Both Russell and Louise have performed elsewhere, Russell spent some of 2005 performing as Gastone in La Traviata around the UK, while Louise has done a number of gigs internationally. In my humble opinion, they are both worth going to hear.

Hawaii - the project expands

A couple of years ago I started taking panoramic images of London. Over 120 to date have been put together. Inspired by this, and actually enjoying it, I then had the fantastic opportunity to do the same for Hawaii. – the result was The Hawaii Map. Using the excuse of having to travel there for a wedding, I then spent an extra 2 weeks on Hawaii Big Island with a camera, tripod and a borrowed truck, kindly lent to me by Paradise Helicopters. You can see the red jeep in some of the photos – it crops up every now and again. This was a fantastic thing to be lent, great fun and made a great platform for taking the images around Volcano National Park. The format was the same, using a map and pinning a load of images to it. The whole thing is driven by Mai Technology. So now you can tour Hawaii Big Island from the comfort of your home, see some of the lovely beaches, visit the volcanoes and other bits and pieces. I hope to go back, not least so I can enjoy relaxing on some of the beaches, but also to take some more images of the other islands in the chain.