We are incredibly thrilled to share the news that FortiusOne is acquiring Mapufacture. You can read more about the news at HighEarthOrbit, the FortiusOne blog, and Brain Off. Here is the official press release.

We have a history of working closely with the team at FortiusOne. Together we share a common vision of building the pieces of the GeoWeb with free, accessible data and easy to use geospatial tools. They recently released GeoCommons Finder! that enables easy sharing of KML, CSV, and Shapefile data, and will very soon be announcing more pieces of the GeoCommons suite.

By comparison, Mapufacture has been focused on tying into the dynamic geoweb of syndicated data and web services. We’ve built adapters to many social and map making sites, as well as generally gathering up the available GeoRSS and KML that has been emerging and providing interfaces to find, visualize, and access these in a variety of formats.

Together, FortiusOne and Mapufacture will be able to push the concept of freely, and easily accessible federated geospatial data - and easy to use tools for advanced map-making and collaboration. The team at FortiusOne could not be better - they are rock stars, GIS-wizards, and all excited about really pushing out the technology.

Building Mapufacture has been an incredible experience. What started out as a project to demonstrate an index of a new format called GeoRSS grew into a company that effectively demonstrated geospatial aggregation and provided free mapping tools to organizations and individuals around the world.

Mapufacture.com will remain active for the near future. At some point we’ll begin offering users the option to migrate their accounts and data to the GeoCommons suite.

Thank you to our users, supporters, and partners. We’re looking forward to continue building the GeoWeb together.

At Mapufacture, we have been continually pushing out the boundaries of the GeoWeb and exploring new territory. Linking together complex geospatial data along with lightweight-dynamic GeoRSS and KML and then combining these together using new technologies for visualization and access on GPS and mobile devices.

However, in the push to utilize new technology and electronics, there are times when older solutions work best. For example, while traveling through China last December, I didn’t want to use my mobile phone to access the expensive, or often unavailable, GSM network to pull down maps and data. I also couldn’t easily share a digital map with friends or taxi-cab drivers.

To answer issues like this, we began exploring the incredible versatile medium of paper. Good old paper that is foldable, writable, shareable, and reproducible. We spent several evenings brainstorming under the wise influence of Aaron Straup Cope, who works at Flickr, but has a rich background in print. The idea was to use PocketMod style foldable booklets, but feed it with geographic data and maps.

The result are PocketMaps. Just like normal PocketMods, but each item in a map or KML file show up as page with a marker and map showing the location. If the place has a photo from a sharing site like Flickr then the image will be brought in as well. You can even optionally have simple map of the place, or include overview, or zoomed out, maps of the area to help you find where it is in a large city.

As an example, you check out this PocketMap for PodCampDC (pdf). If you haven’t used a PocketMod before, they are simply sheets of paper split into 8 areas, and require a single cut and folding to turn into a 1/8th page booklet. You can even fold several sheets of paper together for a bigger booklet. There are folding instructions here.

Really, we’ve been working on PocketMaps for awhile - since Fall ‘07. But dealing with the intricacies of dynamic, geospatial, user-generated digital data and easy interfaces for generating quality maps has been difficult, and we’re working hard to get it right. I hinted at them in my presentation at Where2.0. However, despite our efforts to quietly test and try out PocketMaps, Hackszine (and then LifeHacker) picked up on the new feature and showed it off. They called in the anti-iPhone, which is an intriguing idea as well.

We’re continuing to improve both the PocketMap generation tools as well as the actual PocketMaps. It would be great to combine these maps with other information such as itinerary, travel details, and more. There will also be the option to change the underlying map providers to match the Mapufacture map or other map styles as appropriate.

And if you’ve read this far - then there is an added bonus. We built the PocketMod and PocketMap libraries on Aaron’s excellent Perl code, and his PHP PocketMap tools. However, being Ruby developers we decided to rewrite it all in Ruby - so you can grab the PocketMaps open-source library on GitHub.

This morning, Business Week published an article, Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes:

GeoCommons, OpenStreetMap, and Mapufacture are three online hubs where people can collaboratively map areas, which could help in emergencies

Read the full article.

Discussing the recent hurricane in Myanmar, as well as the well-known issues around the power and failure of geodata and maps in response to Katrina in New Orleans and areas - the article gives a quick impression on the utility of the applications we’re all building to be useful in disasters, recovery and response. As Jesse points out, there is still a long way to go. Many have remarked on the great demonstrations that emerge from news of a disaster, and the benefit they have on awareness of events. However the next important step is putting these tools in the hands of responders.

We’ve been fortunate to work with the UNJLC as well as InSTEDD in employing tools that have immediate implications to responders and hope to work with more organizations in the future.

More recently at Mapufacture, we built a map to aid in tracking the progress of the fire and evacuation centers of the Santa Barbara Gap Wildland fire.

At Mapufacture, we have created a lot of tools to make it easy for users to build and share maps. It’s not always easy to provide powerful tools in intuitive interfaces. And while we’ve definitely seen some really terrific maps created by people, we also understand there are others who may encounter problems with knowing how best to use the site, find interesting feeds and services, or even (gasp!) bugs.

To help assist the community, we’ve teamed up with GetSatisfaction, the next generation of customer service and support, to host our support forums. At our GetSatisfaction site you can share your thoughts, frustrations, successes, and suggestions with the Mapping community.

Beyond just Mapufacture.com, we’ve also included forums for some of the other tools we build, such as the GeoPress blogging plugin for MovableType and WordPress.

There is also a sidebar on our blog where you can see the latest discussions and search our forums. We hope that users sharing with each other we can all build on ideas to make better maps. So if you’ve had problems adding interesting layers to your map, or linking in your personal geospatial streams from blogs, Flickr, or any other tool - please let us know. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

We’re proudly sponsoring the OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map, this July in Limerick, Ireland. You should totally go.

Last year was the first SOTM, and that event fully assured me that OpenStreetMap was in good hands, many good hands, and here to stay. Now so much happens with OpenStreetMap, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with everything, so SOTM will be an intense immersion. Schuyler and myself (Mikel) will be talking about our experiences with FreeMapIndia2008.

Mapufacture.com supports OpenStreetMap as a map option through Mapstraction, for a start, and there are all sorts of more interesting potential integrations. So we’re happy to give back and sponsor SOTM. And it’s really neat to see our little 128 pixel logo over there!

When designing Mapufacture it’s a continuing challenge to provide users with understandable and easy to use interfaces for building maps and finding interesting data sources. The primary concept of Mapufacture is that you can choose an area of interest, and then add data feeds to your map as layers.

The most common difficulty we see is that lots of people are creating maps but not adding any layers. We recently released a number of improvements to Mapufacture, the primary feature being much improved map and layer editing.

Now you can edit your map and add new layers all within the same view of your map. This should make it much easier to quickly make changes without having to go to a new page.

To start, click the “Edit Map” menu on the right-hand side, and choose “Add Layers”. You’ll see a new panel underneath your map with a number of options. Based on your map location, title, and tags Mapufacture suggests several feeds that may be interesting. There is also a list of your Favorited, or bookmarked feeds.

You can also use the Search box to look for other layers based on any keyword, and even limit searches to feeds that correlate with your map’s location.

If you like a feed, click on the title, or the feed [+] sign to add it as a layer to your map. Click “Save” and you’re map should be updated.

You can also quickly add any data source to your map while viewing the feed using the “Add this feed to a map” quick select in the “Share” section.

We’re definitely interested in hearing from you on your thoughts about the new interface. Does it make finding feeds and layers easier - or is there something else we could do?

To let us know, check out our new GetSatisfaction feedback forums where you can ask questions and give feedback about Mapufacture and other tools we help build and support.

It’s been awhile since we’ve written on the Mapufacture blog. That’s because we’re busy finishing up a number of great additions to Mapufacture and projects using Mapufacture. The team is all gathered out in San Francisco for several conferences and high-bandwidth brainstorming and development. While the tools like instant messaging, IRC, wiki’s, and code repositories make location-independent teams possible, nothing is better than physical proximity to solidify ideas and efforts.

In a couple of weeks we’ll be demoing at the OGC Technical Committee Meeting on the power of mixing OGC WMS interfaces with KML visualization and large GeoWeb datasets. It’s been an interesting, and enlightening 6 months working with the OGC on standardization and advancement of the KML. There have also been a number of discussions in the larger geo-community on Atom links to OGC services, OpenSearch-Geo interfaces to KML and pagination link within KML. We’ve been adding these quietly to Mapufacture and in the near future we’ll have more information on why it’s useful.

We’ve also been working with a number of really great projects in advising and building their collaborative mapping solutions. These are really grass root projects that need to easily bring together data from a variety of sources and systems, and then visualize these and share them back out. With Mapufacture we’re showing them how easy this is, and doesn’t disrupt their workflow, but actually fits into it.

We’re also slowly improving the user experience of finding data and building maps in Mapufacture. We want it to be easy for non-GIS experts to easily build geospatial visualization, so understanding the expectations and workflows has been interesting. We’re always looking for more feedback and will soon be opening some community tools for more Mapufacture users to share their experiences and ideas. You can also always ping us at human@mapufacture.com for immediate feedback.

Happy Mapping!

The UNDP Eastern Europe and Central Asia Bureau had a major relaunch of their Environment and Energy website for a major ministerial meeting in Belgrade last October. Maps were a big feature. And those maps were produced by Mapufacture Inc, in part utilising mapufacture.com.

There were two main tasks. A system to geotag UNDP environment projects, and a pretty map display. We decided to do both decoupled, in their way, from the UNDP CMS. Through RSS/GeoRSS it was just easy to link together the UNDP CMS and Mapufacture. The CMS produced an RSS feed of projects, and Mapufacture was set up to aggregate this feed. This was then made available for UNDP users for item level editing — dragging and positioning on the map. And as usual, Mapufacture made this feed available for export as GeoRSS, which was aggregated back by the UNDP.

Item level editing? Yes. Mapufacture has a lot of features built up but not just yet ready for launch, which line up even greater control over the GeoWeb for our users and customers. So from existing feeds, “private” copies can be made for editing, while still keeping them up to date from the source, or feeds can be created from scratch, and editing access controlled, etc. Sure elements of this have existed for a while here and there, but combined with Mapufacture’s existing tools and future features .. I’ll just say I’m pretty excited by what this all will offer.

Making a pretty map from that GeoRSS feed didn’t involved Mapufacture direct, but did invoke all our map making skills and hacks. Used Mapstraction to easily build marker filtering and brought back MGeoRSS for greater control over the loading of GeoRSS feeds — GMaps native GeoRSS handling just isn’t nuanced enough. The biggest trick was getting the map to display above the page. We were working within the limitations of the UNDP templates — and the middle column just didn’t provide enough space for the map to breath. Starting from leightbox I got the map overlaying on top of the other content properly .. that took a good deal of tweaking! And it uses anchors so that the back button works correctly and all.

So a fun project overall with the UNDP, pushing forward their technology, one of several I’m working on at the moment — not all map related but pretty interesting stuff. And we pushed forward Mapufacture. Perfect pushing.

You can now take Mapufacture maps and feeds and put them on your GPS.

That third green button links to the GPS page for the feed/map. We’re still thinking about good iconography for GPS.

On the GPS page, you can download GPX (supported by most all synchronization software). Or if you have a Garmin GPS, you can use the Garmin Communicator plugin to download directly to your device to your device.

A nice one to try is the Wikitravel GPS export.

GeoRSS on your GPS is pretty woo!

If anything positive is coming out of the devestation in California, it’s the responsiveness of the GeoWeb .. lack of information is not a factor in the response.

FortiusOne is collecting data and visualizing. Chris Schmidt is building an impressive collection of sources here, including MODIS layers, KML, OpenStreetMap, and the latest processed diy aerial imagery from PictEarth.

We’re building up an aggregated view on Mapufacture. The time navigation might be particularly useful.