Mapitol Blog

Mapitol project is being referred in some news’ websites. For now this is a result of a content published by Lusa, the Portuguese news agency. You can read them in Portugal Diário, TVI24, Diário de Notícias, Correio do Minho, Lusa Brazil, Ciência Hoje, Açoriano Oriental, …

Those articles are all in Portuguese language. Free English translation of main topics follows:

Portuguese creates the greatest web directory, soon to become “the best directory”.

Portuguese Carlos Zamith has created the greatest web directory and intends to convert it in the “best ever”, has revealed to Agência Lusa the creator of Mapitol (reads as map it all).

In the first public presentation of Mapitol, Carlos Zamith revealed to Lusa the major goals of this project, started 18 months ago, and, setting aside from the search engine concept, he puts his idea as “the reinvention of Internet”.

“What this directory has in special is its great dimension. Existing directories have tens of thousands of categories, we will have tens of millions of subjects” he explained.

Carlos Zamith, who has abandoned a 20-years career as an auditor and business manager to dedicate himself to Mapitol, refers that the idea has came from the need to find more quickly relevant information and in an instinctive manner, in a tree structure where each subject has up to 26 sub-topics and so on.

“When we want to find specific information we have the current search engines that do the work in a very efficient way. When we want to deeply study a subject or we don’t know exactly what to search for, it becomes very complicated to find what we want” he said.

The great difference of Mapitol refers Carlos Zamith, “is that we have developed a web robot that crawls the Internet and automatically categorizes all the web pages in the tree of subjects”.

The tree is structured in a way that allows the categorization to be very precise and the results being almost automatically registered, without much further revision by editors”.

In the opinion of Carlos Zamith, who expects to launch the site in the first quarter of 2010, with the objective of reaching 100 million monthly page-views, Mapitol “will not rise as something to take space from Google and other search engines”, rather as a “new tool”.

“If I want to study deeper any subject, I will know that Mapitol is the best solution, where I can find the best sites on that subject, a community of users with whom I can chat and exchange information and where I’m able to find related subjects in a structured tree. If I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for, I will have many related subjects to look into”.

The existence of a mapicode, soon to become “something like the web-equivalent of the ISBN code”, the fully-contextualized advertising, and the development of a tool that will allow parents to filter the information accessed by their children, are other innovations of Mapitol, which is oriented to all the Internet users, although restricted to English content in the first step of the project.

“Mapitol includes the concept of collaborative Internet, where users can participate and improve the site, with changes depending on the votes of the virtual community. It’s a very democratic system, and that I think will be much appreciated”.

With an investment of 200.000 Euros and 8 collaborators in the first stage, Mapitol wants, as stated by Carlos Zamith, to remain in Portugal, although the current crisis and the kind of relationship Portuguese businessmen have towards Internet may prove that to be a difficult target.

The second phase of the project involves an investment of 250.000 Euros, of a total of 1.5 to 2 million, upon completion, when it will have around 80 collaborators.