You might think about how a wiki manages to neatly sidestep the issue of organizations not having useful web pages, by making it dead easy for someone else to give them a name in a namespace that makes sense.

If you look at

http://arborwiki.org/city/Category:Farms

you’ll see the Farms category in Arborwiki, which covers Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Washtenaw County and anything else close enough by to make notice of. And dig a little bit more to

http://arborwiki.org/city/Harnois_Farm

and you’ll get a web page for a turkey farm and a turkey farmer who doesn’t do any marketing at all – who will probably never have a web page, so it makes sense for the net to make him one so he doesn’t have to.

It is possible to “sort of” link to an individual pin: Google Maps
http://snipurl.com/openpin-sgj [maps_google_com] This opens the map to a pin location with the pin open.

Even so, I’m not sure I’d want to use any of the standard Google/Yahoo/Microsoft online maps as the framework for collaborative curation because, well, they’re not inherently collaborative.

I’d be more inclined to do what I described in this posting. Maintain the official list as you already do, URLify the records (perhaps as simply as by exposing HTML fragment identifiers), populate an individual tag space with pointers to those records, and then encourage contributions to a companion public tag space.

So, hypothetically, your official list is this tagspace:

del.icio.us/unhcoop/monadnockfarmersmarket

The public tagspace is:

del.icio.us/tag/monadnockfarmersmarket

While you are the only user of that tag, those two coincide. But if you are able to solicit other contributions to the public tagspace, it grows. You can monitor its growth and include some but not necessarily all of the new stuff into your tagspace, which is understood to be the official and clean list. The unofficial and messy list is available as well to anyone who cares.

As you monitor the messy open list for items to include, you have two choices. You can take items individually, or you can decide that items from a particular source are all good, and approve everything from that source (subject to revocation later if need be).

Following up on this: I’m thinking about a good way to do this with places and locations that lend themselves to a geographic representation, and have started playing with My Maps in Google Maps. Here’s a map that NOFA created for Vermont Farmers Markets: http://tinyurl.com/5m2nos . Here’s one I started with the conservation lands and trails in New Boston: http://tinyurl.com/6zftgk .

I’m not sure how to handle the curation issue right now, as there isn’t an RSS feed (yet) for these maps, but there is a kml file you could grab and use to see what others have added. I’m going to think more on this. Another issue I see, is that is more difficult to link to an individual map point with a url, though it is doable.

Any thoughts?

Ah, OK.

> It is a challenge though, when these items
> are being gleaned from many different
> sources, most off-line, to ensure that
> they are up-to-date and will remain
> reachable at a permanent address

In fact you can never ensure the correctness/completeness of this kind of directory. That’s why there needs to be loose coupling. You want to curate a view of a set of resources as best you can, refer users of that view to the original sources where they exist, encourage the creation of original sources where they don’t already exist, and arrange so that new sources can find their way onto your curated list.

Just recently for example I made this curated list:

http://elmcity.info/blogs

It comes from here:

http://del.icio.us/judell/monadnockblog

So it’s curated, I control that list. But I’m inviting contributions to this broader list:

http://del.icio.us/tag/monadnockblog

I’m subscribed to that list. If and when items show up there, I have a couple of choices:

1. Move selected ones to my curated list, so they’ll auto-publish

2. Decide that a given contributor is trustworthy, and include their contributions in the auto-publish mechanism.

Just a note that most of the LightenUpNH website is not database driven at this point…I had them make all the pages .cfm extensions in preparation for making much of it come from a database. Right now, just the Helpful Places and People section is being pulled from the database. I agree that we should probably make each data point linkable and will undertake that when I get a chance.

It is a challenge though, when these items are being gleaned from many different sources, most off-line, to ensure that they are up-to-date and will remain reachable at a permanent address.

Steve

As a user I hate it when I have to take a screenshot to show information to someone rather than send them a URL.