EISPIRATEN

http://www.trailbehind.com/

Found some of my stuff on there. Does this just grab URL's and pull info off pages to populate the map?

Looks like the developer has signed up. 8)

Not unusual to see plagerized stuff on websites, especially when the content is put up by 'members' Summitpost.org's mountains, routes and peaks pages are filled with stuff copied directly from guidebooks, some of it no longer relevant. Makes you wonder if the folks who put up those pages ever hiked/climbed those areas and mountains..

yeah looks like they've grabbed at least one of my trials - allison mine loop. but they link to my everytrail gps, so I dunno. It would be better if they make it clear about where they are getting the stuff and crediting those people, but its not like they aren't leaving any trace of where it comes from.

Trailbehind? I thought it was a medical condition. Like a dog scooching across the carpet on its ass.

Hey everyone,

I am a co-founder of TrailBehind. To tell you a a bit more about how we index data, we have a web crawler that looks for geo-data and reports about places, and we organize it on the map. Users can also upload reports and tracks.

We're not a very big operation right now (it's just myself, my girlfriend Anna, and my best friend Tim operating out of our cabin in Truckee), but someday we hope to have a complete map of all outdoor information on the internet and derive actual maps from the aggregate geo-data.

I hope we haven't offended you all by indexing your content. TrailBehind is essentially a geo-search engine, so we do not produce content. Our intention is to direct people to other websites - that's how we know we have done a good job. One of the key things we measure is how often and fast people click through to reports once reaching our site.

In building our search index, we also follow the guidelines that any ethical botmaster would follow. These are:

1. We obey robots.txt, which is a protocol webmasters use to control bot access. Also, we clearly identify the source of our bot so people can complain or disallow us.

2. We only display 200 characters of a report in the snippet on our map.

3. We link back to the source of the information clearly by linking the title, which is the largest and top-most text on the page.

So, I hope that you find TrailBehind to be a useful service, and I think you'll find that we operate much the same as the Googles and Yahoos of the world. Our goal really is to get more people to read your reports, and we founded Trailbehind because we love to hike, and we wanted to make a better way to find information.

If you have any questions or further comments, please feel free to email me at andrewljohnson@trailbehind.com. I'd be happy to hear both ideas on how we can best respect content owners, as well as how we might be able to improve TrailBehind. Comments, praise, and criticism are all appreciated.

Also, I like to write reports and take tracks. You can see my reports by clicking the journal link on my TrailBehind page or thumbing through my trips on the map: http://www.trailbehind.com/user/andrewljohnson/. I'm not as hardcore as the folks who inhabit SummitPost though

I like your idea and its nice to see hikes in your area on that map. But i agree wit hthe others. itwould be nice to see some original content. There are to many other hiking sites that just re-direct information!
Kind of looks like www.thishikingtrail.com but better organized

Edenoch,

All the new stuff shows up on this page: http://www.trailbehind.com/new_stuff. We have hundreds of original reports, but they are hard to find on the map because we index about 500,000 reports, and about 10,000,000 distinct waypoints.

Feel free to upload a track

I wonder if it was someone from this forum who uploaded this track today, as I don't recognize the user: http://www.trailbehind.com/trips/viewtrip/153348/

Hikeup wrote

Trailbehind? I thought it was a medical condition. Like a dog scooching across the carpet on its ass.

I'm just glad it wasn't another porn site with maps to get there you know "Trial Behind"