John Smith wrote: > Don't ya just love a good chicken and egg problem. Yellow pages > works because it has both critical mass and usually a physical > product is sent out.
Before telecom deregulation (1980 or so), every person (or household, anyway) was in "the phone book" because there was just one phone company, and you were listed in their catalog. I dropped my landline around 1996 and have since only used a non-incumbent cellular provider. Today, the only reliable place to find my number is on my website. I doubt that any "yellow pages" catalog covers a critical mass of all business any longer. We're back to the 19th century, when, before telephones, various private publishers printed "address calendars". Theoretically, you can still use governmental census registers and business incorporation listings. But the number of illegal aliens (temporary guest workers on a tourist visa, or without any visa) is constantly increasing. Maybe, in this era of Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, it is our task to compile the new (and free) business directory and put these names on maps. With a web crawler, we could try to dig out street and city names (and opening hours) from web pages. Or we could instruct businesses who want to appear in OpenStreetMap to embed exact coordinates in their websites and then "ping" our crawler. I'm not going to run that project, but it's not completely unrealistic anymore. You only have to figure out how to make it sustainable with people and money for servers. Maybe some kind of Craigslist for shops and restaurants? -- Lars Aronsson ([email protected]) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
