Now that's rather useful...

[jducoeur]

Thanks to someone creating an LJ RSS feed for it, I found the Open Guide to Boston. It's a wiki, designed as a sort of open-source version of those ubiquitous city guides that you can find six thousand of in any bookstore. Indexed by locale and category, it has zillions of entries for restaurants and stores and such. It's pretty data-light at this point -- I think they generated their initial data set off of Google, so most of those entries don't have unique content yet -- but it seems like an idea well worth encouraging. So spread the word, and put in commentary on a few of your favorite restaurants...

Comments

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Zami.com, actually, not Google, because I'm scared of Google's legal department, and not of Zami's. (Not that what I'm doing is illegal in any way: there's no database copyright protection in the US, so it's safe, but that doesn't prevent lawsuits neccesarily.)

Saw your edits, looks good. Any interest in getting a gathering of people together to talk about it? I'm thinking about doing one in a couple weeks: "How to write a good entry", "What would you like to see", etc. someplace in Cambridge to gather people who are interested in the project so we can work on filling the data out some more.

There's about 500 entries with actual content in them (and going up regularly), out of 11400 entries.

(By the way, I run the thing.)

[jducoeur]

Howdy! In principle I might be interested in a get-together; in practice, my schedule is loony, so I'm a tad commitment-shy right now. So don't try to schedule around me, but keep me in the loop if it looks like something is coming together, and I'll see if I can make it. (Emailing me with my user handle @ LJ should work.)

And thanks for setting this up -- I think it's a fine tool...

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Understandably. Right now I'm working to get together a group of geo-intrigued people for a physical meeting of some sort, with the idea of working on projects related to describing the world around us. Taking the brains of those people and siccing them on the Open Guide to Boston to fix what might still be broken about it (i've already put a lot of time into it) is one of my tasks at the moment, and then the idea of getting a more social "OG to Boston Users" meeting going after that.

I'll keep you informed. I've considered creating a mailing list several times, but haven't yet decided if I'm ready to go that far. (That is, the list is already set up, but I'm not sure if I want to move discussion there yet.)

Thus far, I've been posting updates to b0st0n, but the community is spammy and not well suited to this kind of thing because the people there basically suck. :) So I don't know.

Okay, while typing the comment, I made my decision. I'm going to start using discuss@boston.openguides.org (http://boston.openguides.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss) to talk about stuff related to the guide. I'll figure out if anyone actually uses it later. ;)