“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
Roy Amara
Local Guide Best Practice: Attempts to add bus stop or train station
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Picture by AndyLeungHK on Pixabay
[This is one of a series of articles originally published on Local Guides Connect]
Did you ever try to add a bus stop to Google Maps? Or suggest an edit to an existing train station? If so, here is my prediction for what happened to your submission: it was ‘Pending’ for a while, and then later on was labeled ‘Not applied’. Correct, isn’t it? Well, in fact that wasn’t very hard to predict, as local guides are simply not allowed to Continue reading
Quote of the day #113
“Life is too short to be normal. Stay weird.”
Unknown
Song of the day: Aztec Camera – Walk Out To Winter
Should you stumble, somewhere in the deep, dark crevices of your cupboard, upon a can labeled Legendary 80’s Tracks, and decide to open it, it’s nearly impossible that it would not contain this Walk Out to Winter by Aztec Camera, a Scottish band which was modestly successful in that particular decade.
This song is one of the seldom cases where the extended version (referred to at the time as the maxi-single) not only meant twice the amount of minutes, but also extended quality and enjoyment for the audience – so, if you don’t like it right away (which would utterly surprise me) please put up with the 4 minute intro and stick around for the gorgeous guitar solo that starts around 5:43.
Quote of the day #112
“When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’ “
Lao Tzu
Just asking… #9 – Billionaires
Picture by pasja1000 on Pixabay
Why on earth would one person ever need a billion euro (or dollar, if that is your currency of choice)? In which sense could that person experience a genuinely higher quality of life compared to someone having ‘only’ 100 million? I’m not claiming that all the wealth in the world should be redistributed to the extent that everyone would have exactly the same – some people undeniably work harder than others or have far more responsibilities (e.g. over matters that can decide over life and death of others) and it is perfectly legitimate for that to result in receiving, say a 10 times bigger amount of money. But not 10.000 times more.
In the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, a handful of hedge funds managers collected more than 1 billion per person per year. If you can think of a single argument to not qualify that statement as utterly obscene, do let me know. I can’t think of any.
So: why does the world need to have billionaires? Just asking…
How to recognize Google Local Guides
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
Quote of the day #111
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”
George Bernard Shaw
Local Guide Best Practice: The best order for suggesting edits
[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
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!
THE SECOND HALF 