101–110 of 132 posts
One more reason why I don't trust POIs I find on Google Maps. I always try to find the actual business' page to check for phones and opening and closing hours.
But it's a restaurant so you know they like to not list the phone number, hours, or menu (sarcasm).
If you have ever used mapmaker, and attempted to update/modify POI and roads, then you will be aware of the strange and unvalidated process of accepting and denying changes to Gmaps. There are more than a couple bad actors that are Approved Google map moderators. I am not sure if their collective actions for denying and modifying changes are a net good or net positive. It has always seemed strange that someone from W…
Out of curiosity, have you tried OpenStreetMap? You get the same enjoyment of editing without the "random/poisonous moderation process", plus the data you contribute is open, rather than private property.
I always wondered about this, but now it's obvious: google doesn't make sure those business info are accurate, it might have a huge cost to verify those info, for example asking for some paperwork to check. openstreetmap, on the other hand, seems much more trustful on this, since it's moderated a little like wikipedia is. I guess if openstreetmap was more popular, you might start to see similar problems described in…
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As a business owner, it's your job to make sure those listings are accurate, just as it would be you would want to make sure the yellow pages had your right phone number. There's no excuse for technological illiteracy or ignorance, and if you don't want to bother to be in charge of your online presence, you had better hire someone for the job.
What if the owner has no idea that his business even has an online presence? I can see that being very common amongst older business owners, especially if they have never even used Google before.
I think it's likely that he had little interest in the online presence of his business, but he must also have missed opportunities to better manage it (I'm thinking of information from a chamber of commerce or similar, or just conversations with people).
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Out of curiosity, have you tried OpenStreetMap? You get the same enjoyment of editing without the "random/poisonous moderation process", plus the data you contribute is open, rather than private property.
Do you know what OpenStreetMap has done to avoid the toxic editing community? Wikipedia also has a problem with a toxic community; are they doing something different?
And then there are Quality assurance tools: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_assurance
Right now most of them are more geared toward detecting accidental errors, but it is pretty safe to say that once OSM becomes more popular there will also be tools optimized to detect vandalism.
I also feel like it's a lot easier to get in touch with the community, at least here in Germany: http://www.openstreetmap.de/community.html I actually still haven't found a simple German Wikipedia Forum where I could just discuss a page, which is something that really helps new users.
If you are running a popular place, whether you like it or not, you'll end up on Google controlled listings. Unfortunately, there's little help for a non-tech savvy business owner to fix problems with listings or fake reviews or even removal of genuine reviews. This is an area where they need to be held accountable. If you are wielding so much power, you need to handle it responsibly and error in favor of business ow…
I expect a few bad reviews - nobody runs their business in such a manner that every customer is satisfied 100% of the time. If I see nothing but outstanding reviews, I'm going to assume they're all fake.
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You can't even rely on a business' website anymore, though. You have to actually call them on the phone and talk to a real person there, at the business. Too often even the business owner doesn't have time to update their website or get the "web guy" (read: his brother in law's son) to update the website in a timely manner.
If I were Google, Yelp, or Facebook, I'd give serious consideration to selling local businesses pre-created, theme-able web sites on a subscription basis. They already have essentially all the content such sites would need, and better designers than most small businesses would have access to. I regularly run into local places that use their Facebook page as their de facto virtual storefront, but that format could be…
This is an example of one of the major problems of crowd-sourcing: trust. There is no way to verify that the integrity of the submitter, who could be giving wrong information due to malice, incompetence, or as a prank. There's entirely too much trust in crowdsourcing.
It works very well for Wikipedia though, but that's because Wikipedia has much more people that care about the information and maintain it. Google Maps lacks that community feeling of providing correct information, probably because it's owned and operated by Google. Maybe local business organizations can provide help in this, have a few people dedicate some of their time to making sure all listings are correct. Alter…
The world is a better place without a restaurant serving bear meat.