Since I’m now in a bigger, better, brighter city, I restarted some of the work I’d done on creating an OpenGuide for where I lived, previously Manchester, now Boston.<\/p>\n
There was some discussion over simply using MediaWiki in a local LiveJournal community for the storage of the content, but I made an argument for structured metadata. After creating a Google Maps View of Things in Boston<\/a>, I think that I convinced the detractors that the structured metadata technique evangelised by OpenGuides can be a much more useful for expansion.<\/p>\n As usual, however, the wiki nature of the OpenGuide has led to it lapsing as a data source. I can only spend so many hours a day adding and editing nodes, and with limited help, the resource is unfortunately limited in content.<\/p>\n This is a cry for help. If you are in Boston, or know of things in Boston, or know people who know of things in Boston, have them hop on the bandwagon. I’d love to see the Boston Guide take over from places like CitySearch for top Google hits. A service where people can contribute directly to the content, good or bad, is much more worthwhile to me as a user than one where all I get is the phone book description from an agency which probably charges to list there.<\/p>\n