Entry rss feeds

Today we added rss feeds to each entry listing. An excellent tool to monitor updates to your listing, or your competitors…

Zenbu to Google Earth. Come in?

In our continuing quest for nifty features we’ve added Google Earth compatible KML files to our export data types. This means you can export Zenbu data directly into Google Earth.

The best thing I can think of to do with it is a virtual fly by of New Zealand’s golf courses, but maybe you can do better? Anyway, it’s cool and live now.

In the middle of the street

It’s a little thing that’s bugged me for a long time so I finally sat down and fixed it. The zenbu maps take you to the ‘middle of the street’ if you don’t enter a street number with your address, but till now the middle was calculated as the point midway between the minimum latitude/longitude coordinate and the max lat/lon – which meant that the middle was only on the street for straight streets and for big long curvy roads it could be way off.

Anyway, I’ll spare you the grueling math, but now the middle of the street is always on the street itself (curvy or straight) – mmmm, tasty.

Advertising funded search engines

A post today on John Batelle’s Search Blog – For What It’s Worth references some paragraphs from Larry & Serge’s original paper introducing Google. It’s a point I raise (with a twist) when discussing the difference between Zenbu and the Yellow Pages so it’s nice to see it backed up by Google’s founders.

Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

In the era of hard-copy directories advertising funding (and lots of it) was the only feasible way to facilitate the production ,of a directory covering every business, and mass distribution, to every person. The internet greatly simplifies most of the costs of production and distribution so less advertising funding is necessary to support the same product.

Of course pre-web businesses aren’t interested in massively chopping their revenues so they end up charging ridiculous prices for very little return. I haven’t heard many complimentary words about online yellow pages services – from advertisers or users. The search relevance is usually poor and advertising ineffective for both user and advertiser.

Of course I’m not saying Zenbu won’t use advertising funding. It would be silly not to! Imagine this scenario

I’m searching for a nearby Japanese restaurant
Zenbu shows me a highly targeted ad about special deals at local Japanese restaurant available now alongside the natural proximity ordered results.

The advertising is of signifcant utility to the consumer, and I for one would welcome it.

People generally don’t mind advertising, as long as it is targeted and relevant.

Full Export

All Zenbu data is available copyright free under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Basically the license means you are free to copy, distribute, display and make derivative works using Zenbu data by simply giving credit to ‘Zenbu www.zenbu.co.nz’.

You can export one listing, all results from a search or the complete Zenbu database. We encourage you to use Zenbu data to power your projects. The more people who use Zenbu, the better it will get!

Let us know what you do with Zenbu data, we love to see where it goes. The first major external user is the New Zealand Open GPS Maps Project which uses Zenbu data to put POIs (Points Of Interest) on the maps.

The Complete Export link is on the Zenbu Export page. The data file gets updated every night at 3.25am. (You need to be logged in to export)