How Tagcrumbs approaches local reviews in comparison to Qype

We are often asked how Tagcrumbs is different from popular review sites like Qype or Yelp and why you should favor the one over the other. Yes, there are obvious overlapping use cases but let's do a quick comparison to show in which areas Tagcrumbs is suited best.

Qype is a user-generated local review site where users add reviews about local businesses like shops, bars or restaurants.

With Tagcrumbs you and your friends can add stories, opinions or reviews about any arbitrary place that you discover while on the go or while surfing the Web.

First, this sounds similar, with both services you can read and write interesting reviews for places you have been. The difference is that Tagcrumbs has no thematic focus on reviews and thus supports a higher diversity of user-generated content. It's about all the little local discoveries and the insider knowledge around us, for example:

• a picturesque viewpoint on top of a building
  
• a photographer's favorite motives
• a collection of architectural highlights in a city
• interesting diving spots
• travel experiences
• places for extreme sports
• airplane spotting

Tagcrumbs creates a virtual layer on top of the physical world, where every place can be attached with virtual post-it notes. The good thing, it's not mandatory that you have been at this place, you can also use Tagcrumbs to plan your travels or to plan which restaurants you want to visit while on a city trip.

So what are the advantages of using Tagcrumbs?

• Ease of use and the fastest way to share places of your interests with friends and others
• Powerful mechanisms to discover new content by tags, keyword searches, places or friends. E. g. "Show me all my friends' places around me for the topic architecture."
• We support the author, whenever you add a new place to Tagcrumbs it becomes it's own page with a focus on exactly this content. I.e., it's not one out of many reviews on a local business page.
• Sharing, recommending and adding favorites is well-integrated into the system so the user-generated content can be part of everyone's conversation.
• Support for the geo community with standards like KML or GeoRSS

To conclude, there is a demand for more than just review sites, the world is more diverse and with Tagcrumbs we help all the heterogeneous interest groups to share their insider knowledge.

By the way, here you can see all my Tagcrumbs in the center of Galway visualized with Google Earth. I marked, shared and recommended meeting spots, free wifi cafes, reviewed restaurants, reported about a fire, complained about the bicycle situation and participated in local events. Although very diverse local content, Tagcrumbs as a one-stop 'place book' makes every place stand out on its own.

Update: Comments

Thanks to the ongoing feedback of our users who, over the course of the last couple of weeks were asking for more possibilities to exchange opinions, discover other members and add to the stories and descriptions of individual Tagcrumbs we have now integrated comments.

One detail that I like a lot is the possibility to follow a conversation: if you add a comment to someone's Tagcrumb you can choose to be notified via e-mail if someone else joins the conversation and leaves a comment herself.
This is just one of the things on our agenda which in the future will result in an increasingly detailed and colourful impression of every place tagged on Tagcrumbs. Stay tuned for more!

One question that you could help us answer is the following: should comments have a subject line (which e.g. would make it easier to scan through them if there are already a couple)? Have a look and let us know what you think. We are as always looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Update: Favourites and Recommendations

We have updated two integral parts of Tagcrumbs that should make the service faster and easier to use. Here is an overview of what's different:

1. Favourites
Our members can now show that they like a place (and maybe even more importantly easily remember where it is and what it's about) by adding it as a favourite. Wherever the star symbol () appears, clicking on it lets you choose which tags you'd like to use and adds the Tagcrumb to your list. What's great about favourites: it's easy to see who else and how many people in total liked the place you discovered.

To be able to better distinguish your own Tagcrumbs from the ones you favourited, we have chosen to show them in two different formats. The upper one is Cornelius' Tagcrumb which I favourited and below that is mine (story on a public park created on an old train track in New York). As you can see, both have been favourited once.

2. Recommendations
It's now possible to add a short note (Twitter style, 140 characters) to recommendations and send it off to friends on Tagcrumbs or via e-mail. Recommending it to someone who's already on Tagcrumbs has the advantage that the friend will see the note directly in his list of places. Great to personalize a recommendation :)!

Here's an example. Cornelius recommends me The Berg (a fake mountain imagined by some inhabitants of Berlin):

We hope you like the changes - please do check them out. And if you have any comments or feedback we would love to hear from you! Also stay tuned for the next updates, there's more to come!

The Places of the Show Me Galway Photography Challenge

Yesterday I participated in an enjoyable photography community event called Show Me Galway.

'Show Me Galway - Spring' is a Photography, Sketch Challenge and outdoor time challenge all rolled into a one day event.

Each team had a four hour time period to take the best suited photographs for twelve categories ranging from Park Life, Cafe Culture, Saturday Market to Industrial Harbour. The interpretation was up to each team and resulted in sometimes very similar photographs but often to very interesting takes on a topic, still having the bold head in my mind, a perfect fit for the Recession category...

Exploring your neighborhood is always bringing you new insights and perspectives, a perfect example to showcase Tagcrumbs and how easy it is to add the places of your interest and to share it with your friends and your local community. Start by walking to the Saturday Market, eat vegetarian Indian Mattar Paneer, drink a coffee at the Skeff or Cafe Luna, watch the park life at Eyre Square or the children playing with the fountain, and don't forget to take a look at the exhibited photos at Bar No. 8 at the Docks.

A big thank you to the organizers, everyone I talked to really enjoyed the event. Wishes for the next event: a more transparent voting system, knowing the winning picture of each category would be really interesting, too.

All photos of my Show Me Galway Flickr Set are licensed under Creative Commons. Take a look at other interesting places to explore in Galway.



More great photos by Gerhard, team Espresso, another DERI team.