Or rather, one of my Flickr photos – of the large photoboard at the Hopvine Pub on Capitol Hill in Seattle – has been schmapped. Schmap appears to be a not-so-new (founded 2004) travel guide mashup that combines information on points of interest (from Wcities, an online travel information aggregator), e.g., restaurant reviews, with photos of the those places (from Flickr), and a map (from Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft). [My Flickr photo was included with my explicit permission.] Another friend had a Flickr photo that was selected for use in the Schmap review of Place Pigalle (an example of Flickr helping to make the world seem smaller and more connected).
I’m including what I hope will show up as a schmaplet below – Hopvine should roll around in the autoplay sequence (#22 of 32). I’m not sure whether the code was intended to be embedded in the body of a blog post (vs. a widget along the side), and it seems to give TypePad’s editor problems … I hope it doesn’t break anyone’s browser.
Although I have a number of photos of restaurants and other points of interest on Flickr, I’ve decided that I’m going to use my public Twango account to represent my self as a “foodie” – uploading old photos from food experiences there, so as to not disrupt the time-sequential nature of my Flickr account, which is more of a general historical record of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. Perhaps one of those photos will be candidates for future schmapping.
This co-promotional marketing dimension leads me to wonder whether Schmap’s inclusion of user-generated content will help differentiate it from other online travel services. I know that my ability to upload photos to accompany restaurant reviews I write on Yelp is a definite appeal of that Web 2.0 service. On Yelp, though, I get to directly post reviews and photos … Schmap intermediates this process – someone else writes the reviews, and Schmap appears to select photos rather than enable indiscriminate posting of photos (not that my photos are ever indiscriminate, of course). This will increase the signal-to-noise ratio, but at the potential cost of reduced engagement with the users generating the content … reminding me of my dilemma regarding the use of Yelp vs. TripAdvisor in sharing some of my experiences during our recent family vacation along the Oregon Coast. Of course, maybe co-promotion was never Schmap’s intention, anyway … another example of my increasing symptoms of apophenia (the condition – “the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data” – not danah’s blog … which I don’t read nearly often enough).