While we were chatting on #openguides IRC, perigrin asked me and Bob why we find RGL useful. We came up with a lot of stuff, which I have summarised below. I thought this might be a good question for other guide admins/users to ask themselves. What do you like about your guide(s)? Why do you use them? I would be interested to hear your answers.
Bob uses RGL to keep track of known decent pubs. He also likes writing reviews as a means of procrastination :)
I use it: - to keep track of known decent pubs and restaurants - to help me find pubs near specific restaurants (for meeting in before dinner) - to note down the quirks of various Tube/rail stations; see e.g. http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Wimbledon_Station http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Green_Park_Station - as a quick reference for which central stations are served by specific outlying stations, to help me plan my journey when I'm visiting an unfamiliar area - to note down which dishes are the best ones in local takeaways - to find cafes and pubs that I can stop off at when I'm on a long walk - as somewhere central to keep links to reviews, forum posts, etc about a given place, so if I'm meeting someone somewhere I can just give them a single RGL link instead of three map links, two pub review site links, etc
In the past, I've used it to keep a list of restaurants I'd not visited but wanted to - but the list got too big so I stopped doing that because I didn't want RGL to have too many stub pages with no original content. This is basically because London's so big - I have no such qualms about the Cambridge guide, which I also have a hand in running.
I also just had an email this morning from a friend who says she's using RGL to help her explore her neighbourhood. She plans to visit a new place every week and write it up for RGL.
Kake
I use it: - to keep track of known decent pubs and restaurants - to help my friends to find pubs and restaurants - to help my friends to visit park in Brussels
Dimitri
So I started this question by asking it of Kake and Bob saturday morning then got busy and couldn't come back to it until now. There are lots of questions about why more people don't use the guides and I thought it would be helpful to look at we as admins use the guides we run. Most of us seem to use it as a form of extended memory (There was a good pub|bar|restaurant here). This is probably why most people would use it, and really we need to figure out ways of making that easier and more accessible for people.
For me personally the Guide is a hobby that helps me get in touch with the city I live in. I wasn't born here, nor did I grow up here so I found that working with the guide has made me more aware of the local history and space than I would have been otherwise.
I think right now the issues we have is that more people don't realize that they exist. The project as a project is in a period where we're ... not stalled ... but resting a bit. Taking our Guides out into our communities is as far as I can see the next place to go. The current issues facing the guides aren't technical as far as I can tell, but a social. How can we (as admins, and power users) get more people adding to the Guides?
-Chris
On Wed 20 Feb 2008, Chris Prather chris@prather.org wrote:
I think right now the issues we have is that more people don't realize that they exist.
Yes - exactly. I keep hearing "RGL is great! Why didn't I know about it before?"
I don't think OpenGuides necessarily needs to compete in the great user-generated content bunfight - we don't need to be fighting against Trusted Places, or Qype, or whatever Friday Cities is called this week, because what we do is different. What we need to do is to reach the people who already _want_ what we're doing, but who don't know that what they want already exists.
I think part of the problem is that people aren't talking about OpenGuides. Way back when we started, there was a huge amount of buzz around OGL - the Semantic Web people were excited, the psychogeography people were excited, everyone was excited. We're still exciting! It's just that the buzz has died down.
Most of the people I'm talking to about RGL at the moment aren't new media/web 2.0 people, but people who've spent a good part of their lives involved in local community stuff, and are now looking at ways to take this online.
Kake
openguides-dev@lists.openguides.org
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Chris Prather -
Dimitri Pasquazzo -
Kake L Pugh