Category: Plazes I visited

Checkins (either current or afterwards). Named Plazes after the first social location sharing tool. These postings are currently unlisted.

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Was at Bagels & Beans Vathorst (Amersfoort) earlier today (map)

Het is de eerste openingsweek van de Bagels & Beans in Vathorst. Prima locatie, op loopafstand, en prettig dat er een aangename lunch- en koffieplek in het winkelcentrum is. De eigenaren zijn erg vriendelijk, maar zij en het tienerpersoneel moeten hun ritme duidelijk nog even vinden. Dat komt neem ik aan vanzelf. De Bagels & Beans website vermeldt de nieuwe vestiging nog niet, dus een link naar een recent nieuwsbericht.


Koffie en lunch vandaag met uitzicht op de verkleurende bomen in het winkelcentrum

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I have been thinking about how to share check-ins or announcements of upcoming travel, and wrote that down in the wiki section: Individualised Plazes. Previously I imported my Swarm check-ins into this site, but I do not want to use such apps anymore.

The purpose for me of sharing location information usually was to enable serendipitous meetings. When I’m at or just left some place, or will be in some city. Crossing paths between me and people in my network have led and can lead to serendipitous meetings. Such meetings are valuable.

Another purpose can be sharing a little review of a place where I’ve been that day.

I’ve named check-ins Plazes (after the first social location sharing service I used), and travel plans Dopplr (the service that used to do this so well in the past). The forms are really simple at the moment, and I’ll gradually make them more useful to me. At the linked page I’ve added some considerations on how to make such posting more useful outside this blog as well, by determining location and location related information beforehand, and by enabling discovery after posting. For now just posting is a start.

I’ve posted an example of a check-in, and an example of a future location. I draft postings through a simple form on my device that uses micropub to post it directly to this site. The forms can be extremely simple because I only need to cater to me and my habits. My personal preferences are predictable to me, and thus easy to code into a function with a handful of variable parameters. Depending on the input of the form it adds the various microformats to make the posting semantically interpretable by machines.

I think there’s no risk for RSS readers of over-sharing (nor for site visitors as the postings won’t show on the site for now). Only when I think there might be an opportunity for meeting someone I’d otherwise not meet, will I share my location. Or when I want to post a review of a place. Unlike in Swarm/Foursquare there’s no gamification going on, nor a leaderboard each week, to nudge me to check-in as often as I can to score more points. No locations to be ‘mayor’ of. Just me going about my days.




A screenshot of my check-in form, and of my ‘dopplr’ form for future locations. Both extremely simple.

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