Rejoice for there is Spam

It’s not hard to see that pornography has driven technological change in the last quarter century. Proof :

• VHS won over Betamax because the porn industry embraced VHS (apparently myth but a good one)
• That multi-angle button on your DVD remote.
• Click-through on porn spam is 280 times higher than the next most effective (pharmaceutical) spam.

Anyway the point of this is to say Zenbu just got it’s first real spam!

User papuli signed up on Monday (probably Sunday in Europe) and added a few Zenbu entries linking to his ’sexy dating easyflirt’ sites. (Didn’t last long as the daily updates reviewer smelled a rat and quickly removed the entries.)

This is excellent validation of Zenbu as spammers must see Zenbu as a technology of the future.

Of course there are plenty of businesses for whom the key words ’sex’ or ‘porn’ would not constitute spam so we’ll know we’ve really made it when searching Zenbu for those words (all time search engine favourites) gives more than a handful of results. Till then, toodle pip.

Ah beurocracy

We’ve always got an eye out here for interesting, copyright-free sources of data to add to Zenbu and share with the world. I thought I was onto something when I came across a list of premises with Food Ratings on the Rodney District Council website. Rodney really came through. They maintain an up-to-date list of every business which serves food to the public including trading name, address and type of premise e.g. bakery, grocery, fruit & vegetable, cafe, restaurant, takeaways, food manufacturer. We loaded that onto Zenbu so now we can authoritatively say that we have every food outlet in the Rodney district! Very cool.

The Rodney data is missing phone numbers but it does have the Who (name), the What (tags) and the Where (address). Phone number and website (the How) would be great but I trust that the community can fill in this detail as we go forward. Having all the basic data makes it much simpler to add that one extra field.

One down, only another 72 territorial authorities to go…. (Is it just me or does that seem like a lot of government for such a small country?)

I moved to Auckland City next, why not start with the biggest. They have a food premise search system on the website but it was a little cumbersome to use and did not present all the information I could see on the certificate in nearby cafes. So, I invoked my citizen rights, and made a LGOIMA request (LGOIMA is the local government equivalent of the Official Information Act).

The Auckland City Council (ACC) was very efficient.
Someone emailed me to notify me of receipt of my request.
Someone else rang me to verify the wording of my question which did not specify just Auckland (you know what they say about presumptions) so did I want to proceed with just Auckland? yes please.
Someone else again emailed me to say they could not split their data by type, did I want to proceed anyway? yes please.

So I got the spreadsheet file (only a week after my request, well inside the mandated 20 days), a whopping 3500 licensed food premises in Auckland but the file only has the Who and the Where, not the What. I got back in touch with the very pleasant person who had supplied me the data to ask why they couldn’t supply the license type – which I could see printed on the certificate displayed in rated premises.

Well… She kindly explained that their computer system simply wouldn’t allow them to export that information. They are upgrading the system and by October/November they should be able to supply that data, but…
It may not be very useful because the license type categories were based on the 1974 legislature which introduced the need for the Food Premise Ratings and have been unchanged since – which is why that cafe downstairs was classed as a Eating House. She laughed about how silly it was to collect such useless information and how industrious Rodney must be to proactively develop a better system. I don’t mean to belittle her, she had obviously been pushing for change in the 2 years she has been with the council but obviously slow progress.

I’ve geocoded it (converting address to coordinates), value added some information such as mall names where the address matches, matched it with existing data (700 odd out of 3500 already in, not bad) and added some tags where I know the business. The data is shared in a spreadsheet online here.

I’m still not sure what to do with it though. On one hand it’s better to have some information than none, but on the other hand, it dilutes the usefulness of the site if you search for something that is in there but can’t find because it doesn’t have the obvious word like cafe or restaurant associated. Sigh… suggestions?

UPDATE: Matched up another 500 with existing listings and added the other 2300.

Better in than out. Better to know what you don’t know. Wax on, wax off. etc, etc.

May 2008 on Zenbu

Another exciting month in Zenbu world. 800 edits from 39 different users bringing Zenbu to a total of 41,934 live entries. Well on our way to the goal of being able to Find Everything in NZ!

As always a big thank you to the people who are contributing every month and ‘giving forward’ so that others can have such accurate information at their fingertips.

zenbu	436
burgla	185
AliciaV	20
Addwords	20
bureau	19
garyt	19
MauriceWinn	16
cqrt	12
vrod_rider	9
GaryMck	9

A variety of things were completed on Zenbu this month.
OfficeMax added all of their 20 retail stores. All the Wild Bean cafes have been marked at the appropriate BP stations. The Base backpacker accommodation chain was added as were all the Auckland wide lawn bowling clubs. Who doesn’t need to know where their nearest lawn bowl green is in the urban jungle of Auckland?

Some of you might have noticed the Book Now Online section which is popping up on an increasing number of Zenbu accommodation listings like the one on Mercure Hotel Auckland. Found what you want on Zenbu? Now you’re just a few clicks away from a finalised booking. Nifty! (Zenbu will get a 2% commission on any bookings coming from our site so you’ll be supporting Zenbu too – thanks!)

We’ve also started working with another promising NZ startup called Koordinates. Koordinates aims to be ‘the one place for geodata’. They provide all sorts of layers of NZ (and eventually international) geographical information. We’ve put a few layers of Zenbu data up on Koordinates and will be putting more up in the future. This is an interesting new avenue for people to learn about Zenbu and to instantly benefit from using the information. Well done to Ed & Rob of Koordinates. Look forward to seeing more out of the site.

I’ve already had a few people predicting they will top the updates-leaderboard for June so I expect it to be a busy month. Bring it on!