Urbantag makes it easy for users to curate real-world places. We’ve all shared emails and recycled lists of recommended spots - either for an insider’s travel tips to a city, or simply where to eat a good meal in a specific neighborhood. Now with urbantag your favorite restaurants, bars, shops, boutiques, hotels and other places are always available and always fresh.

An easy way to remember the places you love, the social nature of urbantag also lets you discover recommendations from your network. Our beautifully presented maps provide another way to explore great places on the website or in our iPhone app. Urbantag gives you a single platform to share places with people you trust.

We’re excited to have over 100 influential Tastemakers participating in our launch, with areas of expertise ranging from fashion to parenting, drinking and dining, to niches such as gluten-free living.  A few of our featured maps include:

• Low Dive: SF’s Best Bar Art
  
• Bay Area Outings for Mad Scientists
  
• Where to Eat as a Vegetarian in NYC
  
• My Favorite Toronto Boutiques
  
• Favorite SF Sites to visit with Kiddies
  

and you can see some of our Tastemakers here

We also have amazing curated content from brand partners like Liquor.com, The Bold Italic, Boutiika & Red Tricycle.

Start tagging your favorite places now: www.urbantag.com/signup

- The team at urbantag.

Imagine if you were asked to fill a museum with your favorite things. What would you put in it? What do you think your friends would put in their collection?

Photo by marchenry20art

In our last blog post, we wrote about the importance of curation in today’s information-ridden world and its value in the future. This week, we’d like to discuss the reasons of why people like to curate and how they do it.

Now think back on your museum. Why did you decide to put those specific items in your museum? Let’s examine some of the reasons that may have influenced what you chose.

1. People curate in a way that reflects their personal values. When we compile albums after a special event such a wedding or a family picnic, we curate to reflect our personal values of family and belonging.
2. People curate to reflect how they want to be perceived by others. Upon examining social media services like Facebook and Twitter, it becomes abundantly clear that people specifically pick and choose the photos and information share based on how they want to be viewed. Rarely do you see your friends post embarrassing photos or extremely personal aspects of their lives (well…depending on your friends of course).
3. Most importantly, people curate to reflect their perceptions of the world. Pinterest, a virtual pinboard where users can gather all the things they like on the web, attracts people who see the world as a dynamic, abundant source of beauty and inspiration. Pinterest users curate to showcase their personal perceptions of the world and its many objects.

It is especially interesting to relate these three reasons for curation to the top three tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: love/belonging, esteem, self-actualization. By curating, we fulfill our love/belonging needs by connecting with people that are similar to us, fulfill our esteem needs by portraying a specific image of ourselves, and fulfill our self-actualization needs by developing a perception of the world as we organize and deal with the items in it.

As curation tools like Flipboard, Scoop.it, Pinterest, and AHAlife continue to grow, it is becoming easier and easier for people to curate and shape their world. Human filtering through curation will become more and more important in the future as we encounter an ever-growing amount of information.

At urbantag, we are working on a tool that will let you create your own personal collection of places to share with your friends. We believe this will change how we all interact with our physical world. For more info, please sign up here: http://www.urbantag.com

Want to guess how much information is in the world right now? In February of this year, a team at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, led by Martin Hilbert, tried to figure it out. What they found was that the capacity of information in 2007, including both digital and analog information, was 295 exabytes (1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes) and growing at an exponential rate. 

This year alone, 1.8 zettabytes of information will be created and replicated. The good folks at Mashable took this number and visualized in quite an interesting way:

With all of this noise, humans face the seemingly-impossible task of finding a signal. 

Currently, we deal with this information overload in two ways.

One modern method of dealing with this problem is through algorithmic filtering. Google, Facebook, and many other companies have algorithms that sort our information and present us with what they think is important to us. That’s why if two people search for the same thing on Google at the same time, they will most likely get different results depending on where they are located and who they are. This is useful, but as Eli Pariser mentioned in his TED Talk, can lead to dangerous filter bubbles where people do not have access to information that could be valuable to them. It is important to note that what is being filtered out by the algorithms is potentially just as important as what is shown.

Although machines and algorithms are helping us navigate this new flow of information, the way we previously dealt with large amounts of information was through curation. Today, curation is especially important as it adds a human element to the digital data we are bombarded with daily.

Humans always have and will continue to need to organize and make sense of their chaotic world. Through curation, they do so in a way that ultimately connects them with other humans by reflecting their personal values and how people perceive them.

Stay tuned for our next post where we will discuss this further.

© Ralph A. Clevenger/CORBIS

Last week, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about Foursquare partnering up with various daily deal sites like LivingSocial, Gilt City, and zozi. Foursquare has always struggled with the question of how to actually make money, so this seems to be an important step in the right direction.

Social-discovery sites like Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter have shown that they are successful because they have been able to attract a huge amount of users, fast. But to establish an effective business model, these users must somehow be leveraged to provide revenue. Monetizing consumers’ connections to businesses is where the true revenue lies.

Currently, Foursquare users broadcast their locations through check-ins, and can discover places nearby using Foursquare’s “Explore” feature. Daily deal sites incentivize their customers to visit restaurants and other locations through coupons. By mashing Foursquare and deals, Foursquare is adding geography to improve relevance for daily deals.

The daily deal sites are gaining new distribution and better conversions through Foursquare’s geographic targeting, while Foursquare is finally getting another avenue for monetization.

Local discovery is a buzzed about but relatively nascent field. This partnership between Foursquare and the deal sites will start to target deals by location, but we believe this is only the tip of the iceberg.

How big is the iceberg of local discovery?

Hope everyone has a good weekend and a relaxing 4th of July. Meanwhile, we’ll be hard at work (we promise) at making urbantag the best recommendation ecosystem anybody has ever seen!

Photo by street stars

QUESTION:

If you were planning a dinner tonight with your VC, your grandmother, or your spouse, where do you turn for advice? (or more accurately, to whom?)

Despite the wealth of online review sites, we bet for an important event you’d still seek a recommendation offline, from someone you trust. However, wouldn’t it be nice if those recommendations from someone you trust were available online?

As individuals continue to add rich context to places via photos, videos, notes, tags, etc., online reviews are improving. In fact, a more pertinent problem will likely be ensuring individuals can easily filter this UGC to find content relevant to them.

THE TOOLS WE’LL USE TO FIND OUR TOWNS

Recently, Max Levchin and Bill Gurley discussed how our social & interest graphs are powerful filters for surfacing relevant content. During their talk, Gurley noted that while we value sharing information with our social graph, we are often influenced by our interest graph. In other words, our interest graph informs our discoveries; while we use our social graph to share trusted content. 

We agree with Levchin and Gurley, and are interested in applying these graphs to the process of discovering and sharing new places.

DISCOVERING GREAT PLACES: EXPLORING YOUR INTEREST GRAPH

Pandora and Netflix offer two clear examples of how interests inform delightful discovery.

Pandora creates playlists from similar sounding music (ie. ambient techno). Similarly, Netflix, which once tested a social recommendation engine, now rates movies based on your historical viewing preferences. The result? Both these services excel at grouping and ‘recommending’ material for each individual.  

Applying the same filter to places offers clear value. For example — think about where you go for your morning coffee. Do you choose your cafe based on the coffee? Or do you enjoy the experience because of the energy of the barista; the sophisticated feel of the establishment; the quality of the customers? (Howard Schultz built a bit of an empire believing the latter …)

SHARING GREAT PLACES: INFORMING YOUR SOCIAL GRAPH

Once you have discovered an interesting place (such as a #quiet, #relaxing #tea house?) we want to provide a platform whereby you can effectively inform your community. Friends should be able to easily discover trustworthy recommendations & recognize you for the connoisseur that you are… whether your a maestro of romantic dinner spots, vegetarian restaurants, or rocking karaoke bars.

JUST OVER THE HORIZON…

In a few weeks, urbantag will share our vision for a new way to find, share, and great places. Therefore, next time you’re planning a dinner for a VC, your grandmother, or your spouse, check out urbantag. We think you’ll like what you find :). 

Cheers!

Team Urbantag

Yelp and other online review sites have become powerful tools for helping businesses connect to customers. These sites excel at providing a place where anyone can easily find, create, and share reviews. However, all these review sites were designed before the modern social web, and the design of these platforms is now negatively impacting the user experience.   

As a reader, it is difficult to assess the validity of a semi-anonymous review. Judging a review requires us to make assumptions about the contributor. Is he/she discerning? Fair? Honest? Do they appreciate similar qualities about a place? Short of diving into a reviewer’s history there is not an efficient or effective method for evaluating reviews.
 
Further, as these review sites have grown in importance, some venues are now working to game their ratings. The New York Times recently wrote that “businesses can cheaply contract … reputation management companies to pepper Yelp with fake reviews.”

These review ecosystems threaten businesses as well. Currently, it’s easy for unreasonable customers or competitors to leave negative reviews that severely effect business. And PC World recently wrote “Yelp’s semi-anonymous atmosphere … offer(s) a platform for users to vent their generalized rage with impunity,” giving customers “the upper hand” in determining an establishment’s reputation. 

These issues are quickly becoming more apparent, so much so that Alex Salkever from Street Fight Magazine recently questioned whether Yelp can “save itself from its users.”
 
CAN ALGORITHMS MAKE REVIEWS BETTER?
 
To counter fake content, Yelp has developed an impressive algorithm to screen fake reviews. However, Salkever predicts that “policing Yelp for fake reviews (will be) extremely difficult… because fake reviews are virtually indistinguishable from the real ones.” He continues, “Perhaps Yelp plans to do IP address filtering … (but) it’s pretty easy to tap crowdsourcing services to get lots of people to post Yelp reviews.”
 
And even the best algorithm won’t stop malevolent individuals from contributing negative reviews. Yelp Review Reviews shares Yelp reviews that highlight how unreasonable people can damage a place’s reputation. Recently, YRR shared a ‘review’ from a Yelp Elite member who visited a bar with 30 friends. After demanding special treatment and ignoring the establishment’s rules, the waiter asked the Elite member and her friends to behave. Unmoved, this individual flaunted her powers and eventually left a one-star review of the restaurant.

Frustrating, eh?! Now imagine you were the owner of that business!

HOW YOUR FRIENDS WILL HELP EVERYONE

To solve the anonymous review problem, its time to inject real identities into recommendations. 

A more personalized & transparent review system will help people quickly discover reviews from friends or people they trust. And discerning the nature of reviews will be easy — if your coffee-aficionado friend adores the new cafe across town, it’s a safe bet you can trust their recommendation. Furthermore, in an ecosystem where recommendations are written by people you trust, it will be very difficult for an establishment to ‘game’ their recommendations. 

Businesses will also benefit from this recommendation ecosystem. Reviews shared with friends are less likely to include irrational comments, as social pressures can deter biased reviews. Furthermore, by surfacing reviews from a reader’s social graph, each customer could peruse a unique set of reviews. Therefore, while a negative review might damage a venue’s reputation among one community, it will not necessarily effect how everyone views a venue.  

THE NEXT ECOSYSTEM IS EMERGING

We are excited to be developing a more personal & transparent recommendation ecosystem. Our first step is an iPhone app that will help you save, organize, and share places data as you see fit.

We think you’ll find the results refreshing. :)

Cheers!

- Team Urbantag

To experience urbantag before our public launch, we invite you to sign up today.