How things turn eh?

I read about Local.com adding reviews, and I thought to myself - “is it really that important?”

I look back to my experiences when trying to find something. Be it a doctor, lawyer, or a restaurant - the only time I have ever given a damn about reviews is for restaurants. Most times doctors, lawyers, etc only have a few reviews, and one bad (or good) experience can easily be an anomaly.

Lets take a simple example - finding a doctor. I have a bum knee (on account of a soccer injury), and wanted to find a doctor that had experience in that area. I also wanted to find out how many years the doctor had worked, where they got their degrees, and so forth. Honestly, my interest in reviews was quite low.

This is quite the turn for me - I was trumpeting reviews (and user-generated content) for a long time earlier, but I am starting to shy away from it. About the only place I think reviews work at all are restaurants. In other areas I’ve become convinced that reviews are not the holy grail. No - the holy grail is knowledge about each business (contextual information). Educate me so I can find who I need.

… On a tangent this brings up my favorite argument against reviews - if a business has good reviews, why bother advertising on your site? And if a business has bad reviews, why bother advertising on your site?

Not to mention other problems with reviews - quality, quantity, relevance, spam, shills, and so forth.

I tend to subscribe to every local-oriented website blog. One I subscribed to way back was Burrp, a site that started off as a restaurant review website for India (in one city at that time). Since then they expanded to include TV listings, and more.

Their realization was pretty simple - people everywhere want better online local information, and there is value in making it easy to use. The market pitch is easy - our ‘value’ is in taking previously hard to understand information and making it easy for you to use. The ‘value’ no longer exists in the US (imo) - the easy to use translation has been done to death (observe the comments about newly launched Center’d). But in places from Argentina to India, there is an underlying need. People may not be clamoring for it - but hell, people were not clamoring for Yelp before it appeared.

The latest blog post on Burrp brought a big smile to my face. They created something simpler to use out of ZoomTV, and ZoomTV ended up using them. They created something useful in the local space, and one of the de-facto financial sites in India came to them. People coming to you - the ideal position you want to be in.

I am far from saying that the online local space in these other areas are easy to do. Monetizing (the gotcha) won’t be easy. But for individual entrepreneurs who want to try something new - moving to a new country and trying to dominate the online local space there? Damn that sounds like fun

Whew.

I touched on Argentina local earlier - giant gaping holes in the online local space. The biggest problem really has been the lack of any sort of mapping for Buenos Aires.

So I spent a couple dozen hours and using a mis-mash of APIs and some crawling I’m happy to release Mapa BsAs. BsAs is the local short-form for buenos Aires, and Mapa is the Spanish translation. It has actually been interesting creating a website in two languages, and I think the final ‘product’ is decently useful.

UPDATE: Added widget support - you can now embed the map directly on your site. I am still trying to figure out WHY the pin infoWindow is so damn huge. Really stupid, as it even defaults (when the viewpane is too small) to popup to the left, even though the text is always right-aligned. Sigh … Why?

On my way to Argentina, I read an article in the airplane magazine about two guys who had created a restaurant review website for Buenos Aires.

Their website - Oleo - is a pretty decent website. Yet it is the only website I have found for restaurants in Buenos Aires. Hell - in the US I even found one for El Paso! How could a city with a population of over 12 million only have one website for restaurant info and reviews?!

And that barely scrapes the surface. Mapping here is horrible. Google doesn’t even have any of Argentina mapped. MSN and Yahoo both have parts mapped, but no geocoder. What good is a map without the damn geocoding to go with it?

If anything, being here has opened my eyes that the local opportunity, while (in ways) ‘easier’ in North America, is waiting to be exploited in other forgotten cities. Sure the spending power in BA isn’t all that great - but there are a ton of people, there are a metric ton of restaurants (very few chain stores here), and everyone is waiting to be swept away. Heck, that restaurant review site has 50,000 reviews for just Buenos Aires, without any major backing whatsoever.

Plus - the desire for local businesses to get online is strong. Everywhere I go I see xxx.com.ar - from hardware stores to restaurants to anything else in between. Most restaurants have some form of delivery. The largest ice cream (super popular and super tasty here) chain lets you order ice cream for delivery online! (imagine Baskin Robbins doing the same). But for every 10 restaurants, maybe 3 have websites, and only 1 have anything that is remotely useful (it is amazing how many restaurants here have an email link and that is it). And the demand is there - we’ve used two different sushi restaurants for delivery - one of them being Sushi Furusato (who also owns Sushi.com.ar). 400,000+ hits to the frontpage is nothing to sneeze at.

Incidentally geocoding is relatively easier to do here. Every single block constitutes ‘100′. So 220 Uruguay will be in the same block as 290 Uruguay. And 1030 Sarmiento would be the same block as 1099 Sarmiento. While it would require some legwork, after a month you could easily have the entire city geocoded.

Large amount of consumers: Check.
Desire to get online by local businesses: Check.
Solid amount of tourists/visitors: Check.
Zero competition: Check.

And I’m quite sure Buenos Aires is not the only major city waiting for online-local sites.

And I’m off to Argentina today. I’ll be back in the US mid-August, and will move to NYC end of August.

If you’ve emailed me and haven’t gotten a reply - I’m sorry, trying to burn some midnight oil to get everyone taken care.

Time to go broaden my horizons … Spanish and Tango, here I cometh

I was taking a really close look today at Google’s StreetView, and the fact that they APIed it is (especially technologically) quite marvelous. First maps, then UK geocoding, then driving directions, then static images, and now Street View?

But Yahoo may have beat them out (at least for now). The Yahoo Internet Location Platform is pretty damn amazing. Over 6 million locations, with proper parent/child nodes. Informal space just got a giant shot in the arm.

50,000 limit is pretty decent - I need to find out Yahoo’s stance on caching on your end.

We’ve sold our iBegin city sites to another company, who will be moving the sites off of our domain in < 90 days.

Sad to see them go, but since we haven't actively done anything with those sites in over a year, it was due time we made this move.

More information as the new buyer is ready.

UPDATE: Should clarify as I got a few slightly confused emails. www.ibegin.com will mostly remain as it is (an open listing of the data we sell). We will continue to sell data via iBegin Source. What we no longer own are the city sites - iBegin Toronto, Ottawa, Nashville, and Kalamazoo.

Further Update: Still a bit of confusion. Lets try again. There were five main parts to iBegin:
1. www.ibegin.com - a simple local directory for US & Canada. It basically lets people view our data
2. source.ibegin.com - where we sell business listings for US & Canada
3. weather.ibegin.com - weather info for US & Canada. We sell enterprise feeds to customers
4. www.ibegin.com/labs/ - where we release random things we have worked on
5. City sites - toronto.ibegin.com ottawa.ibegin.com nashville.ibegin.com kalamazoo.ibegin.com - city guide sites that had reviews, pictures, and other user generated content.

We stopped working on #5 over a year ago, and removed all links to the city sites over 5 months ago

What we have sold is #5. #1 2 3 4 are still a part of iBegin. The city sites were sold as we were no longer working on them, and they were basically just lying around. We decided it was a better move to sell them to someone who can actively work on it.

It is unfortunate that more and more nowadays, the ’solution’ to everything must be along the lines of elegant, simple (ie no brain power or activity required), and some sort of advanced systems.

Great example are air fresheners. Five years ago we had the simple aerosol can solution. Nowadays we have battery powered solutions, dual-smelling systems, plug-in modes with fans, and other feature-rich systems that all promise to make your house smell good.

But what smells good? Yes I like fresh mountain air, but that crap isn’t real mountain air - it is emulated junk. Technology is trying to push a solution that really doesn’t cut it.

I ran into the above problem. My wife had been gone for 8 weeks, and was coming home soon. The apartment didn’t smell bad, but I wanted to make it smell good. And I thought - what smells good? What kind of smells do I like? Smells I could possibly emulate?

The simplest answer possible: baking.

I baked three flourless chocolate cakes. And then I left them on the counter. And then I left to go watch a movie.

When I came back roughly three hours later I could not believe how delicious the place smelled.

This little personal story is just a simple example - we seem to have this need for tech-oriented solutions when good ol’ fashioned solutions work way better.

1. Write article on Subject XXX
2. Search for posts on Subject XXX via Technorati Authority, BlogSearch Relevance, etc
3. At the end of your article, make a list of ‘More Information on Subject XXX’ using all of the links above
4. With 100+ links you have now successfully gained quite a few links with minimal effort

DDL:08 was a good experience for us - it was the first time we ever had a booth (though we have sponsored other events), and it was a good experience (more on that later).

Right now though I want to point out to a bonafide ass.

Part of our sponsorship was us sponsoring a Cyber Cafe. At the conference they have two sets of three computers connected to the internet. Two companies sponsor the cyber cafe, setting the homepage on the computer to a site specified by the sponsor. As such, three of the computers were set to www.ibegin.com and the other three were set to www.homes.com.

We noticed this earlier on, and it happened non-stop - some ass kept going over to the six computers and kept setting www.bizclip.com/portfolio/ as his homepage. And by non-stop I mean he would come by every 30 minutes to do this.

I never actually saw the bugger doing this as I was too busy to wait to catch him, but quite a few people let me know what was going on, including one of our employees.

I can only imagine the kind of service and product you would receive from someone who would stoop to such a level. Consider yourself warned.

Update: I should note that quite a few people did this. This one particular individual did it multiple times. At the same time - other than human decency I cannot imagine a way to ’solve’ this kind of behavior. Timers, perma-frames, etc - they all have drawbacks. So really nothing Kelsey nor we can do about it.