I need your help promoting Cambridge ontario because as you know there are several cambridges and ranking for ‘cambridge restaurants’ in google is a challenge. if you wouldnt mind linking to ‘Cambridge Restaurants’ with the text http://www.restaurantica.com/on/cambridge/ i would (as will other Canadians from Cambridge) appreciate that, and would be happy to help promote your newspaper or any other local cambridge content if you think is is appropriate.

Thank you and feel free to drop me a line.

Tim

I think another problem for Praized would be the double identity: one for the community, one for Praized. It’s centralized at Praized so you have to register only once but still, you have to login at each community, I can’t imagine people will do that and non geeks will really wonder what’s going on and where they are. They don’t say if you can vote differently for each community or not. In some cases it would make sense (this is a good dentist), in other it wouldn’t (this is a good restaurant for a conference lunch, but not for a romantic dinner). So again, I think that the solution would be to forget about this tribe idea and to just use groups or tags instead. You’d see a list of groups, select a weight for each of them building a “tag cloud request” (for example, I want a Chinese restaurant that doesn’t have a nice decoration), and Praized would tell you what matches. Communities could provide pre selected groups, but I think people would use the Praized hub directly, or big heterogeneous communities like Facebook. Or if they want to have one tribe per site, then I’d suggest to remove the Praized login, it’s like a barrier really, nobody is going to vote, and to interface with the community login directly, forget about the Praized profile (or use a beacon?), and even let communities order Praized results as they wish, Praized being just a barebones flexible yellow pages web service. I’d prefer the “tag cloud request” myself, I think tags with a cool request interface – I’d see something graphical, with live results as you give more or less weight to tags (perhaps, on a multitouch pad, you’d pinch in or out tags, on Windows it would be an old fashioned scroll control) – could really help in local search, more than the appurtenance to a community. Not sure if people would take the take to “vote” for each tag and to create new tags though, compared to the super fast (once logged in) one dimensional digg-like vote. People who create tags that get used a lot could get some sort of recognition I guess, like the top praizers. There could be the tag of the day, encouraging people to praize or raze places they know with this tag, stuff like that.

Ryan: Tell me about it. You know all too well how many hours we spent at TL trying to crack that nut – I think we got pretty close. One thing I decided a long time ago is that ‘restaurants’ is a pretty awful search term anyway – just like it’s a pretty useless YP category. More specific terms (steak, pasta, chinese) will get you better results. But you all that. ;)

Found one small issue that turned me off… a search for ‘restaurants’ in ‘guelph’ returned McDonalds, Harveys, etc. Always a pet peeve.