2024/SD/venue-recommendations

Venue Recommendations was a session at IndieWebCamp San Diego 2024.

• Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/venue-recommendations

TODO: add video once archived

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IndieWebCamp San Diego 2024
Session: Venue Recommendations
When: 2024-12-07 14:50

Participants

• Tantek Çelik (co-facilitator)
• Joe Crawford (co-facilitator)
• Anthony Ciccarello
• David Shanske
• gRegor Morrill
• Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

Background

• Where to save your personal lists of interesting (physical) places?
• Where to share locations to share with friends?
• want my friends to be able to see what I'm sharing without having to login
• start small and with individual use cases, rather than groups, check-ins, etc.
• replacing Foursquare lists use-cases: https://indieweb.org/2024/SD/project-goals#Foursquare_recommendations_guides
• Do a simple valuable thing to start with and don't let complexity difficulty keep from

Notes

• Venue Recommendation
• Curated over time
• Also because Foursquare is deprecated
• What are minimum viable use cases?
• When I do multilocation chain
• Disambiguation of a chain (?)
• Do we need a canonical location?
• Stale data problem (BAB moved and so checking in required an update)
• *I went here* - "I actually went here" has credibility
• I haven't been here but someone I trust recommended it
  • First person recommendation
  • vs. Second person location
  • I have not been but I *want* to get there
  • Review aggregation has negative (commercial mostly) incentives
• https://indieweb.org/recommendation

• James says hello from Scotland! Have a terrific IWC! Thx James!
  • henlo! -- gRegor Morrill (groan - Joe Crawford, +1 Tantek Çelik 😆)

I don't care for "I've heard of"

Please don't parrot Google Search results, that has nearly zero value to me.

My venue recommendations are all places I personally have been to. E.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20241121191000/https://foursquare.com/t/list/berlin-cafes--takeout

I would also be up for:

• I have not been here but my friend who I trust has been here and says it is good
• I have not been here but it is on my list of places to check out

Perhaps display with different icons and/or colors on a map.

• Anthony Ciccarello has some experiments with reviews and would like to post more structured posts

More examples:

• https://snarfed.org/lists has a few different recommendations
  • restaurants example: https://snarfed.org/restaurants
• In 2000 I had this page: https://artlung.com/san-diego-spots/ - which is recommendations for San Diego (it was associated with a dot com domain at the time) but has no markup that's microformatted.
• Tags can be useful but are difficult to manage (specific vs general location + business types)
• If recommendations are geolocated that could be useful for a search page
• MVP might be a top level page: https://slashpages.net/

Different approaches to a list of recommendations:

• automatically generated venue recommendations page from a set of individual review or similar posts
• manually curated static page — this is the one that Tantek Çelik wants

I don't want to build a page "automatically" by making five more problems for me to solve, or to have write a new post every time.

• use case is to share this place with your friends in the shortest way possible FOCUS on MVP
• A simple list page is a great place to start
• More structured content does make it easier to organize (i.e. location data)

I would go more broadly horizontal like from a list of venue recommendations to then a list of movie recommendations Rather than going deep and building a bunch of building blocks for venue recommendations

• Meridian is a community made tool for location data based on OpenStreetMaps

• E.g.: https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/813624465475848/burn-all-books/ this is the link,

gRegor Morrill maintains some movie lists, including recommendations: https://gregorlove.com/lists/movies/

• Reviews should be simple to post, could even be a name and a thumb up/down

• Paul Ford's six word reviews of SXSW mp3 files, by jwz: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/six-word-reviews-of-763-sxsw-mp3s/

https://web.archive.org/web/20080315014728/http%3A//www.themorningnews.org:80/archives/reviews/sixword_reviews_of_763_sxsw_mp3s.php

• Lightweight! Nobody wants to read all that review or read 763 tweets, but a large page to help discovery can work.
  • 4578 words (763 songs vs 6 words for) (which is 20 minutes or so to read in total)

Note: despite Twitter being in its heyday in 2008, and being particularly suitable to the short format, Paul Ford DID NOT tweet his six word reviews

• Posting multiple reviews probably shouldn't show up in people's feeds (not great for a time based timeline)

You don't want to spam all your followers with all your reviews

It's not a time-based thing like a checkin.

• Tantek Çelik I like the general structure of "places I've been and recommend" and "places I want to visit"
  • could apply that to movies also, maybe books

• Tantek Çelik If posting airport recommendations (places in airports), would prefer them all to be one page grouped by airport
  • maybe each airport code is a section and heading with a fragment so I can share recommendations for a specific airport as a fragment link within the airports page
• A single page manually written has a lot more flexibility in organization than trying to figure out a tagging structure

Possibly automate generating a table of contents of the headings, at the top of the page

• either backend with PHP that parses the HTML and generates a ToC + original HTML
• or frontend with JS that progressively enhances the HTML page with a ToC at the top
  • JS to allow search DOM to easily find things on a page: https://github.com/artlung/lab.artlung.com/blob/master/pages/2025.js

See Also

• 2024/SD/Schedule