Here’s a quick realtime demo. Check it out for yourself:

We have been surprised to see:

1. Planetaki as tourism guide

2. Planetaki as expo hub

3. Planetaki as classroom hub

4. Planetaki as documentation hub

4. Planetaki as cookbook

5. Planetaki as specialized information bulletin

We believe that Planetaki‘s stress-free stream of information approach is what makes it so versatile.  If you give Planetaki any other creative uses, drop us a line.

Online newspapers = columns, too much information clustered into categories, no apparent distinction between important and less important info, Ads. (FAIL)

Why would anyone think a mashup of these two would be a good idea? Giving up all the good stuff and taking on all the bad. Well, we have found out through bitelia that paper.li has done it. In a nutshell: paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format.

Sounds like a good idea? You bet! (if you like your twitter feed full of ads that is).

bitelia’s newspaper (hope they don’t mind us using their newspaper as an example).

In short:

• new design
• improved legibility
• ability to read posts offline
• fixed theme but customizable backgrounds

Hi Everybody,

I just wanted to say thanks for sending a t-shirt all the way to Alaska! You have a great portfolio. Keep rockin’ the minimalism.

Mikaela

No, thank you Mikaela!

Here’s the announcement in video. Enjoy (especially after 32s).

Thank you Alicia :)

• Russian
• Hindi
• Dutch
• Arabic
• Greek
• Turkish
• Korean
• Polish
• Slovenian
• Bulgarian

Planetaki’s a small startup with little funds so we can’t pay you for your job, but we’ll give you a cool gift and you’ll have your name on the credits :) If you’re interested give us a shout hello@vostok.es

So far, the lanaguages available are:

• Spanish
• English
• French
• Italian
• Galician
• Romanian

And the ones that are in process, and you’ll be able to use soon, are:

• Chinese (Mandarin)
• German
• Portuguese
• Euskera
• Catalan

As part of the rebuilding of Planetaki we’ve switched from MySQL databases to MongoDB. It is quite a big change and the results are already noticeable. You can feel the wond in your face when in front of your planet. It’s fast, very fast.

Sam wrote a post about how it’s all set up. The techie inside you will enjoy it. Here are a few excerpts:

Planetaki caches huge amounts of data from posts all over the internet resulting in very large rows. The result is that the traditional database caching and optimisation techniques just aren’t as effective, and Planetaki was getting progressively slower and harder to manage.

[...]

Planetaki now uses a hybrid solution for storing data. The complex feeds and their entries are stored in MongoDB, and user data is stored in a traditional Postgresql database. This allows us to split the system into two parts, on one side we have the feed “reaping”, and on the other the website which mainly accesses the tables of data.

Read the full article: Planetaki powered by MongoDB

It’s no secret we’re huge Swiss nostalgics, and this is a little homage to one of our favorite typefaces, Helvetica. We hope you don’t mind us being retro-stylish once in a while!

To check it out in action just set ‘Helvetiplanet’ color in your preferences. Don’t have a Planetaki account? Sign up here, it will take you less than a minute, really.

So we were amused to find out that Planetaki’s logo is also a Formula One flag. The ever revealing Wikipedia article says:

Ha! Outta the race Bloglines!

We still need to do a lot of work on many details, especially those related to design so we can keep the same user experience we already have on the website. It’s not done yet but… It works!

BTW, the big-sized poster is at the Planetaki Blog, in case you want to find your website in the image.

María, a Journalist by formation (jack-of-all-trades in practice) brings serious communication and organization skills to the table, plus some design fire power for the ultra-cool projects lining up at Vostok for 2009. María lived two years in Turin, and speaks fluent Italian. She also claims to make a mean tiramisu. This, however, has not been personally verified by the rest of the team (hint hint).

Despite looking and acting vampirishly dark, María is the sunshine of the office. She has geeky sense of humor, and will laugh at almost any joke you make, no matter how dorky and stupid. Or probably she is just being condescending with us. In any case, we are extremely pleased to have a great talent and personality at the office.

RosaJC tuvo el detalle de grabar casi toda mi charla, donde hablo de la metáfora del fregadero y la fuente en los lectores de feeds (además de algunos otros conceptos).

Autobombo aparte, las jornadas estuvieron francamente bien. El público era jovencito, casi todos estudiantes de comunicación y a pesar de la edad se les notaba un nivel alto de “avispamiento digital” y bastante madurez a la hora de hablar de ciertos temas tecnológicos. Supongo que el mérito de esto es en parte por la labor de los profes de Comunicación de la UCAM.

También me gustó que el nivel de palabrería dospuntocerista estuviera controlado. No se habló de modelos de negocio, de inversiones ni de emprendimientos y eso contribuyó a mi paz de espíritu.

Yo fui ilusionado por poder oir a gente con mucha experiencia como Chiqui de la Fuente o Georgina Cisquella, pero también disfruté de las charlas de Rosa Jiménez Cano o de Juanlu Sánchez, por mencionar algunos, o de las conversaciones con el resto de ponentes, alumnos y la gente de la organización que estuvieron muy atentos con nosotros.

planetaki -

If you are a Planetaki user and want to try it out, experiment a bit or just do some good to your website readers, try embedding this ultra-tiny piece of code inside your html:

<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://www.planetaki.com/javiercanada.js”></script>

Make sure you change the “javiercanada” piece for your planet slug or it will be my planet showing up on your own house :)

La Antena – add it to your planet

Voltage Blog – add it to your planet

lightgreen – add it to your planet

materialicious – add it to your planet

Have a nice week ;)

Here is a picture of the article, taken by Denegro:

It’s so cool to share these three pages with Unvlog and iwannagothere, two projects we admire, use and love.

Cuarto derechahttp://www.cuartoderecha.com

• add to your planet

Viruete.comhttp://www.viruete.com/

• add to your planet

proyeccioneshttp://www.proyecciones.org

• add to your planet

20Minutos – Tecnologíahttp://www.20minutos.es/

• add to your planet

233grados.comhttp://www.233grados.com/blog/

• add to your planet

Mina Labhttp://minalab.insitum.net

• add to your planet