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Free Local Knowlege

FROM: Martyn OConnor

What NEED does this meet?
How do you know whether the hotel you book or the place you want to visit is really the best for you? How do you know which is the quickest route from one place to another in an unusual town?

What is the APPROACH?
Have local people who are willing to share their knowledge sign up on a postcode basis and anyone can put a query to the area they are interested in so that real people can then reply offering real, up to date human assistance and experience.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
There's no going somewhere and thinking "Next time I'd avoid this..."

What is the COMPETITION?
Not that I know of

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
Not particulary. I could probably build something myself in php and mysql with some time to think about it.

October 31, 2003 in Connecting People, Geographic, Increasing Awareness, User Created Content | Permalink

Comments


Nice idea - I noticed that the New York tourist board were doing something similar where they'd hook any visitors who asked up with a local New Yoirker to show them round town.

Posted by: James Cronin at Nov 1, 2003 12:14:02 AM

Good initiative. Would like to watch developments to fruition. Wd be happy to get e-mail from such do-gooders on how others can help.

Posted by: ssn at Nov 1, 2003 1:06:28 AM

I think this is a good idea, but requires *massive* expsoure to get off the ground. If you look at the figures, there is currently around 1.6m postcodes in use in the UK and if you estimate that you would need at least 5 users from each postcode to stimulate activity, your looking at 8 million users. This has been tried before, but unfortunatly has failed as its very hard to generate activity on such a small focal point as a postcode on the internet now.

Just my opinion tho :)

Posted by: Alex at Nov 1, 2003 2:20:14 AM