Just used the service and had a great chat with Chap, one of the founders. There's something qualitatively different when you're talking to someone using voice - it makes it easier to articulate some of the bigger questions that aren't just syntax or "help me debug this" type of questions. Anyway, I think this is a great idea, and love that these guys are making it happen. Kudos.
Just do what you love. Period. I've had times in my life when that was programming - and it got me a long way, and I loved doing it while I did it. Then I felt the challenge of learning how to build a business. So I made a choice, and stepped away from coding, and started pursuing my passion of building businesses. There's nothing wrong with your passions changing - think of it as opportunities to learn new skills.
One of the funny (paradoxical?) results of this is that I've had my eyes opened on things that I'd love to code. So, I've gotten passionate about programming again. Ain't life funny?
You don't need to apologize for being honest and self-examining - you only need to apologize if you aren't following your love and passion.
"you only need to apologize if you aren't following your love and passion."
Or maybe you are trying to stay alive in a war torn country, or figure out how to keep your family from starving.
Let's all keep in mind that the possibility of "following your love and passion" is only available to a privileged minority of human beings on this planet.
(Not directed specifically at you, but to point out an unstated premise behind the article and many of the comments here.)
Of course, that's completely true - and all the more reason to follow your love and passion if you happen to be privileged by luck of birth, family, and genetics. I think that this is true of many HN readers and certainly describes me. I'm incredibly grateful for being born into that lucky circumstance.
And I don't mean to put down people who can't do that because they have to figure out how to stay alive in a war torn country, or figure out how to keep your family from starving.
Thanks for the feedback - we're learning a lot and all feedback and commentary is valuable and useful, so thanks for your comments! We have a team of editors and curators, but obviously we can't cover every place at launch, so we work hard to cover the long tail of destinations algorithmically. What city did you try to build? I will have out content team have a deeper look into it to fix it up.
Regarding attribution, we do use information from sites like Wikitravel and Wikipedia, and there's a References chapter in every book - you can find it, along with the URLs that we used to pull together your book in that section.
Your points are excellent ones, thanks for the feedback! This is just the initial release of the beta to the public, and getting feedback, criticism and suggestions like yours is VERY valuable. Thanks again!!!
I tried a number of cities, your own home of San Francisco, my own of Cambridge, UK as well as some others I'm familiar with like Bangalore and Tapei. I was very disappointed that the San Francisco guide was of far worse quality than the Cambridge guide for example. I would have expected since the company is there, you might have something interesting to say about the city. Apparently not.
The list of events is worse than useless, it's cheap and tacky. For example, the events for Bangalore lists events in places such as Shanghai and somewhere on the Indian coast over 500Km away, as well as events tourists couldn't possibly be interested in such as agricultural machinery expos. You just can't do this sort of thing by pulling events unfiltered from external sources, that just doesn't work. Full stop. I want a sensible listing of events that I can filter by my interests, each one with a map of the location and public transport details.
The issues you have can't be fixed with copy editing. You simply can't produce a guide to a place you've never been, and you really shouldn't try. This talk about covering a "long tail" of destinations depresses me. Leave that stuff to wikitravel, you should be producing a polished commercial product. At a minimum you need to at least have had one person representing the company visiting each place you produce a guide to. You aren't in the business producing a general purpose guide, you're in the business of knowing everything there is to know about a city and giving people a decent interface to filtering it. Quite frankly, I don't see how you can do that without a team of people going to a place for at least a month.
Some features I'd pay for:
* Suggested itineraries for days, based on a database of places and activities filtered by my interests and biased by predicted weather.
* Some sort of more/less detail slider for each page enabling me to customise the text.
* Complete and up to date public transport listings for the destination, cross referenced with the events and places I've chosen to add to my guide.
Above all, if I'm paying for something that costs about the same as the rough guide I want something at least as good quality as the rough guide. You aren't going to get that with wikitravel and creative commons photos.
Great feedback, you make some very good points. This is, after all, what a beta is all about - to get out there, learn as much as we can, and iterate iterate iterate.
Thanks for being brutally honest, this is just what we want to learn!
