How to recognize Google Local Guides

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Believe it or not, but if you carefully look for some subtle details in behavior and posture, it is possible to spot local guides among the crowd in a shopping street or in a restaurant. Let me list a few of those for your convenience.

If they’re in group, usually during a so-called Meetup, they’re easy to find as they will often flock together around anything that deserves to be photographed – as you can see in the picture taken in Krakow (Poland) during the European Meetup in September 2018. But if they are on their own ‘in the wild’, you really have to know what exactly you need to pay attention to.

In the shopping street, look for: Continue reading →

Local Guide Best Practice: The best order for suggesting edits

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[This is one of a series of articles originally published on Local Guides Connect]

Sometimes you come across a point of interest (POI) where more than one data point is either incorrect or missing: no telephone number, incorrectly spelled company name, no website, pin located incorrectly, etc. As I already explained in a previous post, you should not submit all changes all at once, as this will certainly increase the chance of running into a ‘not applied’: if one of the edits is not accepted, your entire contribution will be marked as the notorious ‘not applied’ (look around a bit on this forum to find out how much frustration this is causing).

But then another question can be raised: does it matter in which order to suggest the edits? My experience (as mentioned in the disclaimer at the bottom: pure speculation, I have no hard evidence for any of this) suggests: yes, it does. Two different factors might be at play here. The first is Continue reading →

Song of the day: Jon Cutler Feat E-Man – It’s Yours

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Jon Cutler must be the proud owner of what might possibly be the shortest Wikipedia page about any musician – apparently there is not much to tell about him. But nevertheless this It’s Yours (2001) in my view is enough to grant him eternal fame.

These days (read; at my age) I can usually resist turning the volume up to the maximum when a song kicks in, but not in this case. Damn good music!

Local Guide Best Practice: Improve your reputation

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[This is one of a series of articles originally published on Local Guides Connect]

By submitting suggestions for edits, you build up a reputation in terms of certain types of edits and/or certain regions or countries. This is very important for the way the algorithms evaluating the suggested edits are taking your reputation into account: if your ‘trust level’ is high for specific factors, your suggestions will more easily be approved.

Let me illustrate this with some specific examples. When I came across a chain of discount supermarkets that is operational is several countries, and noticed that quite a few of them had an incorrect category (either ‘grocery store’ or ‘supermarket’ in general) I obviously had the unstoppable urge to Continue reading →

Song of the day: Allez Allez – Allez Allez

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In the early 1980’s there was a spectacular wave of interesting Belgian bands. This was not obvious to me at the time, as I (born on the mid 60’s) was just discovering music, so I figured this abundance was the default situation. Only in retrospect did I realize how exceptional the era was.

Such a bold statement of course begs for some proof to back it up, so here’s a very nice example: Allez Allez (which happens to be both the name of the band and the song).