Zenbu

Zenbu on Zoodle

January 18, 2012

Zoodle is all about property. It is a treasure trove of information about NZ real estate and the neighbourhoods around it. They’ve recently started using Zenbu data to add the list of nearest supermarkets to each area. Nifty!

http://www.zoodle.co.nz/community/taranaki/south-taranaki-district/hawera

A guest post by Wayne

October 25, 2011

Wayne: was in yellow today, getting ripped off, and they gave me a list of “most popular biz directories” % share

1. Yellow (31%)

2. Finda (24%)

3. Whitepages (18%)

(all three owned by yellow group)

4. Zenbu (8%)

Go Zenbu!

Zenbu Community Forum

June 7, 2011

We’ve created a Zenbu forum where the community can ask questions, get answers, provide feedback, discuss and debate all things Zenbu to their heart’s content. We apologise for taking so long to create this space for you all!

http://forum.zenbu.org/

The forum uses a different login system to the main site; you will need to register again. Please use the same login name to help others recognise you.

Thanks for being part of the Zenbu community!

Seeing the results of CC

April 20, 2011

Zenbu data is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license which means that anyone can access the complete Zenbu database, of nearly 100,000 Points of Interest in New Zealand alone, and use it in their own project or business for free. They can download it or access it through an API. The ONLY requirement is that they must “Attribute” Zenbu, and link to us online.

I think this is pretty damn cool, and so do many others. Zenbu is a truly wonderful information resource that continues to get better and better.

I love hearing about the different places that Zenbu data ends up and I wanted to share a few recent stories.

1. Poqet Directory is a Windows 7 Mobile application developed by the team at TouchManiacs. It is a really slick interface to access the Zenbu data and you should buy it for $2 if you have a Win 7 phone.

2. DineIn http://www.dinein.co.nz/ is a new website aiming to be New Zealand’s single point of reference food website. They launched with a complete nationwide directory of restaurants thanks to Zenbu. Sadly they forgot to provide a link or attribution but quickly added one when we pointed out their mistake. Thanks Dine In!

3. This final really one appealed to my inner data geek. Peter let me know how he was using Zenbu data to help create a New Zealand place name database with point locations that accurately mark town centres. There isn’t any great source of this information at the moment; the data set provided by LINZ is based on scans of paper maps and the place points are known to be wildly (in)accurate.
Peter realised that most towns have a cluster of businesses around the town centre so he could place the Zenbu POI data on top of a set of road maps to quickly identify where the centre of town is for places he had never been to.

Let us know what cool things you are doing with Zenbu data!

Facebook Integration

February 22, 2011

Facebook grows more ubiquitous day by day.

I must admit to feeling jealous twinges for the digital freedom of my ex-(Facebook)-friends who have committed Facebook Suicide and returned to analogue relationships. However I’m reluctant to give up these voyeuristic powers, for now; let’s take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes…

We recently added Facebook Pages to the basic entry profile so now you can instantly see how many people, and particularly how many of your friends, like any particular store, brand or location. If you Like your favourite restaurant, retailer, dentist or plumber then you’ll help your friends discover personally recommended shops and services.

At first we set it up so that you’ll actually be liking the Zenbu page representing that entry, which is still the default if an entry does not have an official Facebook Page.

Then we realised that lots of businesses have spent a lot of time building up the fan base of their official page, so if an entry does have an official Facebook Page then we use that. So far the New Zealand entity we’ve seen with the most fans is Giapo, the ice cream store, with a fairly amazing 14,000+ fans. Are there any other NZ Facebook success stories?

One big suggestion for Facebook Page owners:

If you have more than 25 fans you should think about registering a user name for your Facebook Page to get a ‘pretty’ Facebook URL like

http://www.facebook.com/findZenbu

You can do this from

http://www.facebook.com/username

It’s dead simple and a major improvement on the random id number you had previously.

Most Viewed Entries 2010

December 24, 2010

In 2010 the most viewed entries (and pageview count) on Zenbu were

All these entries have complete profiles and rank highly on Google for that name. I can’t see any other significant correlation!

Wiki spam begone!

December 21, 2010

Where there are users and content, spammers are sure to follow.

They don’t take hints, they don’t make sense and they certainly can’t be rationalised with.

Spammers are not really hoping that you will click on their links, although if you do they are likely to be happier. Their actual goal is to improve their position in Google searches. Wikis are characterized by their open access and willingness to let anyone edit pages. Google measures its PageRank based on links from one site to another, weighted by the PageRank of the site linking to the other. Wikis are PageRank machines, being both massively linked and with hundreds or thousands of pages. These two factors, openness and PageRank, make wikis like Zenbu a tempting target for spam attacks.

Spamming Zenbu is pointless, because external links have the rel=nofollow attribute, which means they will get no google ranking boost at all. However, many spammers seem not to realize this, and carpet-bomb anyway.

Online battery sales and Italian shoes have been popular additions on Zenbu over the last few months. One particular community member, thanks burgla!, has been removing the entries as fast as they arrive – we ban the users but they have just kept coming.

From today edits and additions will be restricted by a number of factors including the country of user origin and Zenbu country targeted. We trust that this will reduce the time-wastage caused by spammers and allow the Zenbu community to focus more on growing valuable content.

Some content on this page sourced fromhttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Spam

Heat Map Visualisation

November 4, 2010

I put up Zenbu NZ data on Google Fusion Tables this morning and was able to produce an awesome heat map visualisation of Zenbu data in a few clicks.

Zenbu NZ Heat Map Visualisation

Click through for the full interactive heat map.

Or see this visualisation with 95,000 clickable markers (and no browser lag!)

The Local Land Grab

September 27, 2010

http://searchengineland.com/who-will-own-local-data-search-engines-yellow-pages-aggegators-or-social-media-50258

is a really interesting article from Chris Smith about the “land-grab for ownership of local data” that is heating up around the world at the moment.

Chris discusses the “database of places” which is a key building block for many of the innovative apps on the technological frontier of “local”, “geo” and “mobile”. This database is the information about what is where; landmarks, locations and particularly business details – all the information that is collected in Zenbu.

Chris Smith argues that a truly open solution will not happen. Obviously he isn’t familiar with Zenbu (and fair enough too, NZ isn’t bold on the international technology radar).

Zenbu has an amazing database of places in NZ (and the Cook Islands) and conforms to the Open Knowledge Definition:

“A piece of knowledge is open if you are free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.”

Chris ironically notes the comment that Wikipedia once seemed like a long shot and preposterous notion, but today it is a mind boggling information resource. I believe an Open Database of Places is possible, and Zenbu could be it.

July / Aug 2010 on Zenbu

September 8, 2010

841 edits from 207 users in July. The top 10 users were

zenbu	403
burgla	56
Linzi	18
MauriceWinn	17
onco_p53	13
netaction	10
info1	10
muriwai_wanderers	9
The-Organist	9
danham	8

and 542 edits from 233 users in August. The top 10 users were

zenbu	55
burgla	45
ShadowEngineer	28
MauriceWinn	19
Clubbie	16
muriwai_wanderers	16
Oblivian	15
netaction	12
newhomebuilders	10
Kiwi_Moose	10

I’m travelling at the moment and have been a bit slow getting the stats up, remember you can always get the latest from http://www.zenbu.co.nz/about/recent

One thing I’ve realised on my journey is that NZ travellers have an amazing tool in Zenbu. Internet can be expensive and difficult to access while travelling and the ability to find things – tourist information, accommodation, restaurants, supermarkets, attractions – makes life so much easier.

Are Lonely Planet and other tourist guides telling everybody to download the Zenbu mobile app before they arrive in NZ yet? Offline pocket access to local information is a killer app. Actually, our sister service of Zenbu wi-fi is also killer for travellers too, pay-as-you-go cheap wifi data in over 300 locations around the country. Go Zenbu! I wish it was in Europe!