ProjectX Blog

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Here is a cool picture of all Met link bus stops (Ferry stops), and schools in Wellington. Its looks like some nature picture with huge flocks of Pink Flamingoes!

Tomek was playing with visualising lots of points of the map and he created this picture of some of the ZoomIn data. Cool Huh !

Here is a simple guide to using Private places on ZoomIn. So lets work through an example. Let say you wanted to share the location of a party this weekend with your friends.

1. Add a place to the site.
2. Go to the privacy section of the place page (on the right hand side of the page under the map). Modify the privacy settings to suit.
   Note: If a place is private you won’t be able to view it or search for it unless you’re logged in.

That’s it!

Bonus tips: If you want to restrict access to the place to a group of people, you will need to ensure that you are a member of that group.

We’ve added a couple of cool features to zoomin.co.nz:

Private Places – now you can set a place that you created to be private, which means that only you will be able to see it.
Or you can set the place to be visible only to a certain group.

To do this, go to a place that you have created (or create a new place), and look on the right hand side of the page. You can alter the privacy settings under the ‘Privacy Settings’ heading.

Video Embedding – now you can embed Youtube and Google Video videos in your comments and place descriptions.

To insert a youtube video:

• find the video in youtube
• copy the URL of the page, it should be something like

• paste it into your comment text, between some youtube square brackets, like this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46LQd9dXFRU[/youtube]

You can do the same thing with google videos, by adding something like this to your comments:

[google]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4147604860974111184[/google]

You can see an example of an embedded video at http://zoomin.co.nz/nz/wellington/rongotai/-wellington+airport/

I’ve cast my eye over Rankr this morning, and I’ve been able to extract a couple of stats.

1) Spread of the different types of sites that kiwis visit. There are a high number of portal sites and news sites due to the number of locals and foreigners catching up with news. Also I have noticed there is a dramatic rise in the number of image / file sharing uploading sites. (10 photo sharing/ uploading in the top 100 sites visited.) And notice the small number of pron sites!

2) Origin of the sites visited in NZ. Kiwi sites make up just over a third of the content that people are visiting. Notice that china accounts over 10% of the sites visited.

I’ve just added a couple of links to help research the blog activity of websites on rankr. Now you can quickly check what the blogspace is says about your site.

Check out Blog Activity on the site detail page. eg http://rankr.projectxtech.com/site/show/zoomin.co.nz

We working on figuring out how to integrating the result of the blog activity into the site.

As always your feedback is appreciated!

ps. Has anyone used sparklines ?

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A while ago, I mentioned that I have been working on a “Web 2.0” application in my lunchtimes. After laying idle for several weeks, the app has received some much needed attention and is ready for its first release!

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What is Rankr

Rankr is a tool that enables you to keep track of website ranking of your competitors over time. Every Tuesday, Rankr downloads the top 5,000 ranked websites based on New Zealand traffic via Alexa monitoring system. Rankr has been monitoring the top websites since September 2006.

Rankr has a number of basic features like: search, graphs, rss etc. to help to track your website.

One last thing, before I get inundated with questions if you’re site doesn’t feature that means its not ranked in the top 5000 visited sites in NZ. Sorry!

Kudo’s to Tomek, Nick and Daniel that have helped create rankr.

&lt Scoop&gt

Chris Di Bona creator of the Google Summer of Code and open source guru is confirmed to speak at Creative HQ Summer of Code seminar series in February.

More details to follow soon.

&lt/Scoop&gt

Have you ever been looking for the right type of diagram to visualise your idea or process ?

Look no further, here is a visualation periodic table.

There were plenty of MBA flashbacks in the Compound visualation section, bcg matrix, five forces, stakeholder maps, affinity diagram etc.

Kudos to the Visual Literacy org for putting it together!

We just added a tag cloud to zoomIn.co.nz. Now you can see all the tags we have.

One cool feature if hover over the tag you’ll get a tool tip of how many places feature that tag.

Enjoy!

I wanted to have a look at drilling into some of the stats of popular places on the site. Here are a few of the various popularity stats from zoomIn.co.nz.

1) Top 25 users of all time ranked by popularity of places that have created.

1. projectx
2. fourcorners
3. viewauckland
4. capital_soccer
5. buses_wgtn
6. benn
7. dineout
8. wotzon
9. willisst
10. tomek
11. tagg
12. dayout
13. wellingtonnz
14. tom
15. travelwise
16. cubast
17. divemaster
18. jac
19. jamespole
20. chart
21. seanduggan
22. nik
23. nzcoffee
24. shell
25. soccer2

2) Top 25 users of all time ranked by relative popularity of places. (ie the popularity of the places / number of places – minimum of 5 user places created to qualify)

1. tomek ( 1165 hits per place )
2. capital_soccer ( 565 hits per place )
3. staticnz ( 506 hits per place )
4. sminnee ( 466 hits per place )
5. willisst ( 364 hits per place )
6. milton ( 350 hits per place )
7. tom ( 320 hits per place )
8. hadinnerjoy ( 280 hits per place )
9. suzette ( 263 hits per place )
10. dubh ( 252 hits per place )
11. hindins ( 241 hits per place )
12. rosslin ( 226 hits per place )
13. barnaclebarnes ( 221 hits per place )
14. nedbedrock ( 219 hits per place )
15. grokbeer ( 218 hits per place )
16. ptorrsmith ( 209 hits per place )
17. dayout ( 193 hits per place )
18. wellingtonnz ( 191 hits per place )
19. nik ( 186 hits per place )
20. surreal ( 186 hits per place )
21. cubast ( 185 hits per place )
22. dingobill ( 181 hits per place )
23. threeta ( 169 hits per place )
24. businessdynamics ( 162 hits per place )
25. nzssra ( 162 hits per place )

3) Top 25 tags ranked by place popularity of tags used.

1. bay
2. food
3. park
4. restaurant
5. island
6. lake
7. cafe
8. bus
9. accomodation
10. bar
11. metlink
12. track
13. school
14. education
15. lodge
16. bed
17. breakfast
18. wine
19. motels
20. beach
21. station
22. house
23. sports
24. arts
25. nature