Earle Martin wrote:
Talking of attracting people, people who have guides need to pimp^H^Htch to potential users. For a long time I've been meaning to, but never got around to, printing leaflets and stickers for the Open Guide to London. How else can we publicize our guides? Snappy web buttons and banners?
Speaking as a guide admin who doesn't have to deal with installation and hosting issues (ta Jimbo), here are the thoughts I've had about encouraging people to get involved with the Open Guide to Manchester.
- There's a large user base on LiveJournal in the Manchester community who know an awful lot about interesting quirky places in Manchester, the kind of places I'd like to see in OGM. Getting these people involved in OGM would be easier if OpenGuides had OpenID support, so we could tie edits to OpenID identities. This would make problems with spam and abuse easier to deal with from an admin perspective, but also be a Shiny Feature (tm).
- Similarly, more images would be nice, which really needs a better interface than people e-mailing their images to admin@openguides.org and having me do ImageMagick-fu manually.
- For meatspace pimping, I was thinking of having business cards printed up with some suitably abstract text like "This place is featured in the Open Guide to Manchester" and the URL of the site. That way I can just put them (with permission) in every pub etc. that's featured in the Guide.
- Closer integration to other community-contributed, geographically-oriented sites like upcoming.org and openstreetmap.org - if we could encourage the OSM guys to implement a good enough API that OpenGuides could do the same with their data as we're doing with Google Maps, that would be great. I'd love to get involved with OSM but I don't own a GPS.
Dave