| Origination of mapanno |
Who created it? Me in France! Why was mapanno created?A picture paints a thousand words - as a designer I am accutely aware that I think and comprend more effectively with visual stimuli. Mathematics was one of my stronger subjects, well probably one of my best and I am still no mathematician - I just don't get a buzz out of numbers, I am certainly no writer and when it comes to music well... In short I like pictures! Some of the most influential people throughout my life have been people pushing the ideas of visual communication. These include individuals you maybe familiar with - Edward De Bono, Richard Saul Wurman, Edward Tuft, Tony Buzan, Paul Smith, Nigel Coates, Richard Gregory and people you may not - Peter Strickland an inspiring artist-designer and John Clancy an early pioneer of Virtual Reality, both of whom where lecturers whilst I studied interior architecture at Chelsea School of Art. As part of my job as a new media developer I spend a lot of wading through pages and pages of 'dry' text putting forward quite complex concepts and wishing if only there was a diagram or other visual cues to help me shape some meaning out of the words in front of me. With seemingly increasing pressure to create 'accessible' web content the safest and most cost effective route often seems to be good old 'legible' plain text. But - is content 'accessible' if you end up reading it over and over to try and comprehend? Or, should 'accessible' content be interpreted as content that is enjoyable to read and memorable - which are key factors in comprehension. Whilst there has been an explosion of image and video sharing websites these are not normally aimed at creating 'informative' content. mapanno differentiates itself from such web services as the main objective is to provide a tool for people to combine the visual interest of images with 'informative annotation' to create fun and interesting content. This is hopefully achieved through a simple process and interface without having to learn any complicated software or use any complicated technology. The intention of mapanno is to be effective yet simple - less is more!
Where does the name 'mapanno' come from?The first name was 'Sticky Map' but after some reflection I had a rethink and anyone who has ever searched for an internet domain name will know how difficult it is to find something available - sometimes its necessary to make words up. To this end I combined the two words 'map' and 'annotate' - which is what you 'do' on mapanno - the abbreviation for annotate is 'annot', then with a bit of creative license I knocked off the 't' - because 'mapannot' does not quite have the same ring!map + anno The name 'Sticky Map' is not completely dead and you may see it used to refer to mapanno maps - again it was derived in a round-about way by a comparison to the paper notes that you 'stick' on things - 'sticky notes'. Why technology does mapanno use?As a concept mapanno has been in my mind for a few years believe it or not - its original inception was centered around adobe flash technology - an excellent technology for interactive content.However, the website evolved into something far different by adopting AJAX which is javascript/xml based. This threw everthing out of the window regarding my normal development path which would be centered on server side processing and databases. Key influencing AJAX projects that have helped shape this site include:
Besides javascript there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes and the key projects I would like to credit are:
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