October 2009 on Zenbu

There were 5,425 edits from 118 different users in October with 110,000 unique visitors and over 160,000 pageviews. The biggest editors were

zenbu	4694
pb12	195
garyt	81
burgla	79
brownees172	59
GaryMck	43
MauriceWinn	23
hoogy	18
jonzee	16
rodo	12

Nice one team! The bulk of the Zenbu numbers was made up of the entry of every Early Childhood Centre (kindergartens and childcare centres) nationwide from a Ministry of Education list. I’m not actively looking for any of these myself but I know that a lot my friends soon will be so it’s great to have this available.

The number of edits on Zenbu will always be several orders of magnitude smaller than the number of views, but as the visibility of Zenbu data scales up, up and away (with increased exposure on search engines and third party sites) we will pull in more and more editors. Reducing the “barriers to entry” is important which is why we try to make the process of editing so simple that anyone can do it with zero training. We do appreciate the ideas we get from the community about how to improve this so please keep that coming.

Zenbu NZ now has well over 82,000 listings, 6 figures isn’t far away and that is exciting!

September 2009 on Zenbu

There were 3301 edits from 147 users in September with over 100,000 unique visitors to the website for the fourth month in a row.  It’s so encouraging to know that Zenbu is helping thousands of New Zealander’s every month find the basic information they need. Thanks to everyone using Zenbu, searchers and editors.

Top 10 editors in September were

zenbu	2422
rc8	333
hoogy	90
GaryMck	55
pb12	48
brownees172	31
tgclark	24
MauriceWinn	21
garyt	18
burgla	17

Vianet provided basic information on over 1500 accommodations nationwide and Booking.com added another 100; this is an excellent boost to one of the most searched categories.

RC8 provided a bunch of spreadsheets of chain stores: Bed Bath and Beyond, Frank Casey Suit Hire, Heathcote Appliances, Les Mills, Pascoes, SBS Bank, Shanton, Pumpkin Patch, Urban Angel and Dog’s Breakfast. Some of the Store Locators for such chains can leave a lot to be desired so it’s great to know this info is readily available in Zenbu.

Hoogy is working on a project to share the locations of Free WiFi spots around NZ and is kindly updating Zenbu as well. Great stuff Hoogy.

GaryMck is making edits all over the country – either he travels a lot or he is letting his fingers do the walking from his desktop! It’s amazing how much Zenbu-ing can be done from the comfort of your home combining internet research, StreetView, Satellite imagery and local knowledge. The Add Neighbour link on each entry page was added this month as an assist for you desktop Zenbu’ers as a way to help people make sure every shop on a street is in Zenbu.

pb12 is another cool story. He is a user of the NZOGPS Garmin GPS maps, which uses Zenbu data freely under our CC license, and noted that he couldn’t find his local Hamilton sports park, because they weren’t entered. Working from a list on the Hamilton City Council website he added every park in the city with details about the facilities available. Very cool. Go Hamilton! Go Zenbu!

We’re Geeking to San Francisco

I’ve been in San Francisco for the last week in what could perhaps be described as a geek-pilgramage.

I took in a tour of the Googleplex in Mountainview (surely geek-mecca for the 2000’s) with Josh Bailey, an expat Kiwi who’s been with Google for a few years (and plays with Tesla coils in his spare time; 50,000 volts ain’t no thang…?!). The sheer scale of the campus was a bit foreboding for me coming from lil ol’ Nuw Zuland, especially with my small business / startup background, even if the location had the least corporate feel I’ve ever seen – littered with lego and beanbags, free massage signs and ping pong tables. I did have Google described to me as “one giant group of startups” with so many individual projects all doing their own thing; this makes sense given their prodigious tech output.

I spent the last two days at the Google I/O developer conference which culminated in Google announcing Google Wave; it’s not the simplest product to describe but may well be called Email 2.0. A product designed to answer the question -

What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?

It combines all the best features of email, instant messaging, wikis, blogging, document collaboration into one uber-tool. In fact it makes email look decidedly archaic and had 4,000 of the worlds geekiest geeks ooohing and aaaahing for 90 minutes. I don’t really see how it could be backwards compatible with “Email 1.0″ and I can’t imagine convincing my Grandma to upgrade but this is certainly how communication will look in the (not-too-distant?) future. 

Two moments that got rapturous applause:

1. A context sensitive spell checker that turned

Icland is an icland.

into

Iceland is an island.

2. Instant messaging with as-you-type foreign language translation.

Nerd-tastic.

Of course the niftiest geek moment of the conference for me came on day 1 when they gave away a Google Android Smartphone to every single attendee (but not Google employees!). It’s the HTC Magic; a very slick piece of hardware and a quality competitor for the iPhone (which every second person in the US seems to have). One was selling on eBay last night for over USD$600, a good markup on the $200 conference ticket! Mine will be coming back to NZ as it is completely unlocked and will work on either of our 3G networks. I can’t be carrying around a mobile that doesn’t have a Zenbu app on it so will have to look into an Android version to add to the iPhone and Windows Mobile apps soon!

Off to Yosemite Park for a few days to unplug from the matrix now, I’m all geeked out.

Doctor, doctor won’t you give me the news…

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Physicians & Surgeons is the 2nd most searched category in the yellow pages according to the Yellow Pages Association. Number 1 is restaurants and we’ve got that pretty well covered these days on Zenbu with over 4000 restaurants listed nationwide, but doctors are sadly missing from the landscape.

Back in November 2007 I approached my lifelong family doctor to talk about Zenbu and see if he could help get all the doctors on board as he was President of the Royal NZ General Practioners Association. His reply somewhat surprised me….

You are correct when you say we are not in Yellow Pages – quite deliberate. Like many Doctors we are overloaded with patients and are not trying to encourage new patients. So much so that I must ask you to remove the listing for us you put on the website please!

Maybe he saw Zenbu as advertising, I see it as an information resource – a digital collection of information freely available to you walking down the street in the real world. (The overwhelming majority of Zenbu visitors are people who are looking for a specific piece of information, an address or phone number, get it and leave. Many websites view a high Bounce Rate (people leaving your site without interacting past the first page they visit) as a sign of weakness, in Zenbu I see it as a sign of success as people have got what they need. Imagine if the Yellow Pages defined success as how many pages they made you look at to find the one thing you need?!)

It’s a very unique business who simply doesn’t want people to find them. I didn’t remove his listing; that information is publicly available in any number of places online and on the sign on the street outside their practice. But I did help him out by finding a new doctor…

It’s time to get the medical profession on Zenbu. I’m currently in discussions with the Ministry of Health about getting a list of Health Practitioners nationwide and that will be a massive step forward. In the meantime I found a few lists of general practices on Counties-Manukau and Auckland District Health Board sites and have loaded those. That means we’ve got 234 general practices on Zenbu right now but I hope one day soon you’ll be able to find every one of them.

April 2009 on Zenbu

1756 edits from 114 users in April, solid work team! The biggest editors were

zenbu 1369
hoogy 66
FantomFan 27
MauriceWinn 27
burgla 23
Gremlin 17
gavin 16
carlh 10
grant 9
xr6_112001 8
308gtb 8
Nedd 7
pcm 6
PGrueber 6
Nickb 6

One of the big wins of the month was the addition of 400 New Zealand physiotherapists. I tweaked my knee playing soccer and could not find a comprehensive collection of physios on Zenbu. I did however find the list of endorsed physios on the ACC website which were quickly added. We are still missing some physios, as not every physio is endorsed by ACC, so if your physio isn’t on Zenbu be sure to add them in!

Another, slightly embarrassing, anecdote from April was when we were contacted by the Communications Manager of VTNZ Vehicle Testing Stations and advised that somehow we had almost every single phone number for their locations incorrect. Provided with a current spreadsheet of all the VTNZ locations we quickly fixed that up and added a few new stations. Turns out a bunch of customers had complained to VTNZ about their details being wrong on Zenbu. Great that people are using Zenbu! Bummer we had those details wrong! Great that they are fixed now! Thanks to VTNZ for clearing it all up. 

If the details of a business on Zenbu are incorrect please feel free to edit it yourself. The information in Zenbu is prone to change regularly so we rely on you, the people on the street, to help make sure Zenbu reflects the real world.

Zenbu is edited collaboratively by volunteers from all around New Zealand. Anyone is welcome to add information and you do not need specialised qualifications to contribute. Zenbu’s aim is to capture basic factual information that would be available to anyone walking down the street in the real world. You can add new listings or edit existing ones in a simple online form. 

A few people have commented to me of late that they actually, really enjoy contributing to Zenbu which is cool to hear. I’m going to create some more material for the power users of the site soon, sharing some of my tips for how to get the most out of, and into, Zenbu. Thanks to everyone who edits, searches, uses and talks about Zenbu – keep it up!

March 2009 on Zenbu

Another solid month in Zenbu world. 3142 edits from 114 users including a few new users who shot to the head of the class!

zenbu 2325
MainstreetWanganui 172
magician 155
hexzed 99
garyt 81
GaryMck 49
vrod_rider 31
burgla 18
MauriceWinn 14
PGrueber 12
segfault 11
Linzi 10
Gremlin 10

Mainstreet Wanganui is an organisation with a goal of promoting the Wanganui town centre. What better way than to put every business in Wanganui into Zenbu (and seamlessly from there into the NZOpenGPS Garmin maps, the Zenbu iPhone app, the Zenbu Windows Mobile app …). It was a pleasure to work with the Marketing Manager Louise at Mainstreet Wanganui who “got” the concept and I quote 

Of course we would like our members to have a broader search-base.

Great stuff. Magician is a new member who went to task on his local area. Welcome to the community Magician.

Thanks of course to the long time faithfuls, we wouldn’t be where we are without you!

In technical developments March saw the release of the Windows Mobile Zenbu app , the addition of Share on Facebook links to the entry pages (we are so down with the kids), and a Google Earth tab on the entry maps – pretty nifty, just download the Google Earth plugin and do a flyby of any Zenbu entry. Rad!

Anachronism in 2009?

 Anachronism: (noun) an artifact that belongs to another time

Another stack of YellowPages

 The Auckland 2009  Yellow Pages was delivered last week. In an age of extreme-green sensibilities, this is a monumental waste of trees. How long before we look at such a photo and laugh at the quaintness of it all?

Yellow Skype

Skype has partnered with Yellow Pages NZ to add all the Yellow listings into the Skype directory and, at least for the 3 month trial, allow free calls through Skype to any Yellow results.

It is an interesting promotion but I struggle to see the real value for Yellow.

• The biggest benefit for me as a user is that now I could search the Yellow directory without having to look at their (often nasty) results pages.
• The cost saving seems irrelevant as most people have free local calling already, even if that does mean the extra hassle of dialing a number instead of clicking a button, and we all know New Zealander’s are notoriously cheap.  
• Yellow advertisers and non advertisers results look the same. Advertisers are at the top but will this really drive advertising revenue? (which must be sinking like a stone as the generations who uses printed directories fade away)

This partnership makes the Skype directory infinitely better as the last time I tried it months (a year?) ago the results were dismally useless. Well done Skype but maybe I miss the significance for Yellow.

 

Chris Keall writes in the NBR

Forget Skype and Finda. A major Google Maps alliance, especially with some nifty location-awareness built-in or, say, a Yellow layer pre-installed on Vodafone’s coming Magic Google phone, would be the sort of big-bang move Yellow needs to remind people it exists.

Wait, you mean something kinda like the Zenbu iPhone app that came out last August??

 

Blair Glubb, Director of Digital Media at Yellow, says in the NZ Herald

The future for us is actually taking the information we’ve got and pushing it out via a whole bunch of channels.

which is very similar to something I regularly say

Zenbu is about taking the information visible to you as you walk down the street and making it available to you whereever and whenever you need it.

but that’s about where the similarities end….

Yellow Pages. Staff 500+. Revenue $293,000,000. Listings 250,000 (my best guess). 

Zenbu. Staff 0.5 (plus a dedicated community!). Revenue $5,000. Listings 67,000 (and growing!)

Who are you gonna put your money on?

Those LGOIMA/OIA Requests

Ed Korkery has started up a blog to record the workings of Official Information Act requests. I have done a guest post based on our experiences with getting the Environmental Health licensed premises data off all the councils, fun, fun, fun.

Gotta keep an eye on big brother too right!

Street View on Zenbu

Google launched Street View, street-level imagery, in New Zealand yesterday. This is seriously cool technology. A lot of the media yesterday seemed to focus on the negative and a small minority whining about privacy concerns. Puhlease. The photos are taken in a public place and nobody really cares to see you walking your dog or watering your lawn. Google has avenues for reporting imagery of concern so I hope to hear more positive news about all the cool stuff this enables.

Trade Me was first off the blocks integrating street view into their property listings. What a brilliant way to suss out the neighbourhood. Top marks.

Street View is now available on Zenbu too. See examples at the following links (click Street View above the map)

Mission Bay
http://www.zenbu.co.nz/entries/show/1099916-mission-bay

The Beehive (you’ll have to pan upwards to see the hive, not just the garage!)
http://www.zenbu.co.nz/entries/show/1098786-the-beehive

Tamaki Yacht Club (pan right for a great view of Rangitoto)
http://www.zenbu.co.nz/entries/show/1137377-tamaki-yacht-club

Very excited about this. Nice one Google.