Seattle

Party alert – there is a new bar/lounge coming next door to the Robot Coop – brought to you by the mind behind Top Pot and Bauhaus – it’s called Gun Club. Do you think we get a shooting range or more of an early 80s Kid Congo inspired theme?

No longer will you have to cross the ship canal for truffle fries or a drunken chicken sandwich. Fremont is getting it’s own Baguette Box.

Well, we are in the final push on our latest release we’ve codenamed “nightcap”. We are down to about 6 bugs we are working on before we shift gears and start in on the next release: “cupcake”. As you may know, all our releases are named after My Little Ponies, so we will pretty much never run out of syrupy sweet code names.

Nightcap “caps” off about a 4 month focus on 43 Places. We made a lot of progress turning the site over to our users—making it easier to report and correct errors on the site, easier to add places, and added the ability to add events. A few of the newest things you might notice on the site are local “badges” given to acknowledge the locals who have added their knowledge to the site. We also want to add badges for the folks who correct and add data to the site, for the folks who write great stories, and the folks who take such great photos. What else deserves a badge?

We’ve also added neighborhood tabs to the cities on the site. If you know of a neighborhood in Barcelona or Pittsburgh (or anywhere else) please add it! We’d love to get all the neighborhoods in the world added to the site.

Thanks for all your help with nightcap – and if you have more suggestions – throw them our way!

We are still tweaking the new profile page, but we pushed out a few changes today. We added the list back along with the functional links (we sort of forgot about those links, sorry). We also added a little bit of photo love over on the right. You wouldn’t know it (because we haven’t explained it) but the 12 photos are sorted by your cheers – so you can see which spots people think you ought to visit. We also moved the travel map up a bit (but not much).

We know change is never easy, but our goal is to make the site simpler to use and understand, even as it grows in features. Let us know if you think this is getting better.

I’m working on reworking our FAQ and trying to write some better help pages to explain what this site is all about. As I started digging in, I thought, since the site is really built by the users it would make sense to ask all of you how you think the site should be introduced to new users.

When we first launched the site we created a tagline that read: Share stories about places in your city and around the world. We’ve been playing with some new taglines (not that taglines are so important, but they do force you to boil down what you think the site is for). One of these is: Connect with locals in your city and around the world. The site is obviously still full of stories about places, but we started thinking maybe connecting with locals is what is potentially really unique about our site. We don’t want to have yet another review site full of 4 star ratings of restaurants and hotels. We want to build the means for locals around the world to talk about what makes their places special and make it possible for locals to connect with each other (and potentially, connect with locals worldwide).

A totally different sort of tagline we considered was: Live life like you are on vacation. The thought being, when we travel, we are open to new experiences. We notice things that we’d normally overlook at home. We don’t have a predefined grid to impose on a place that helps us decide what is important and what isn’t. We started thinking about how we could try to bring that sort of open love for place into the site and make daily living a little more of an adventure.

Taglines aside, we also just need to better explain what this site is here for and why someone might want to use it. Who better to tell us than the people who built it by adding more than 50,000 places, hundreds of thousands of photos, tags, entries and cheers? Let us know what you think … we’ll join you in the comments!

Digging through my email, I found that my brother had sent me a link to this Seattle Times review of El Quetzal. Has anyone been?

Perhaps a lunch adventure is in order for The Robot Co-op – we are in a lunch rut lately.

We are experimenting with a new approach to maps, and here is the secret url where you can help us test it out: http://www.43places.com/places/map/?browse=1

On most of the site, when we show you a link to a map, we show you that exact spot mapped. Makes sense, right? You asked for a spot, we showed it on a map. Well with this new interface, we’ve mapped all the places on 43 places for which we have lat/long locations (about 11,000 places). Now you can drive around the map, seeing these placemarks. Zoom in on a location and we’ll show you more for that zoom level. It’s a fun way to explore the site.

We’d love to get feedback on this approach and hear what you think. Should this approach become the default view of all maps? Should we add more to it – like letting you add a place to the site from the map? We are also thinking about new/better ways to get lat/long locations for the other 40,000 places in the database.

Anyway, give it a spin and add your thoughts to this thread. Ivan’s getting map happy and needs the feedback!

Eric Hodel has also released some of the code he developed for geocoding locations. If you are interested in taking the internals for a spin, give it a try too!

Some sort of blogish entry from the-not-dead-yet Seattle Weekly weighs in on the openings and closings happening in Seattle. They mention the deaths of Fork on Capitol Hill, Bandoleone in Fremont, and Sakura Japanese Bistro in Maple Leaf. The article also mentions the forthcoming arrivals of new bars Vessel, Havana, and the recent Sun Liquor; as well as Ethan Stowell’s (of Union Restaurant) new place to open in Belltown, the new 1429 12th Ave location for Osteria La Spiga and the new roasteria for Victrola Coffee & Art near the Six Arms set to open in August.

Over on the Licorous page, I saw johnc2000 mention Cremant and a mighty dinner bill. I’ve never heard of the place, but to drop that sort of coin for food in Madrona it must be special. I see Madrona local elizabethu on the list of people who want to go there – but so far, no stories about Cremant. What’s it all about? I’m looking for a new foodie date spot tonight, but I’m intimidated!