Povo-a-gogo

The Boston-based crowdsourced city-guide website Povo finally launched last week.

I say "finally" because written up in the Globe last summer. Here's an excerpt:

Povo is like a blend of Wikipedia, the user-written encyclopedia, and a city map. Starting with Boston (with plans for New York next), the company invites users to annotate the city. "I have a kid, and I want to know which restaurants in my neighborhood have high chairs," says Povo cofounder [and MIT Media Lab alum/Firefly cofounder] Max Metral. "So I might go on Povo to find those, but I might also tag other restaurants that I know have high chairs."

User-generated local content is what it's all about right now. It's the Holy Grail of established city-guide websites like Boston.com and CitySearch, not to mention more recent startups like Outside.In, Platial, Wikimapia, MeasuredUp and Smalltown.

What's smart about Povo, which was developed by Arts Alliance Labs, a Boston-based venture capital firm/technology platform company, is that visitors aren't merely encouraged to post reviews and ratings of Boston attractions; they can upload information, reviews, photos, and other content, and append it to a map of the city.

Check out the map of Farmer's Markets, for example.

There isn't a whole lot of information at Povo, yet. (That's one of the problems with user-generated content.) And I'm not sure I love the name -- "povo" is Portuguese for "the people," but in British slang it's often used to refer to the unwashed masses, undesirables, untouchables, lowbrows and anti-intellectuals. Still, next time I'm supposed to meet someone for dinner in Cambridge, and I want to find a restaurant that'skid-friendly, open late, or eco-friendly, I'll give Povo a try.

PS: Wikimapia is pretty fun. For example, there's a scary-looking house in West Roxbury that I always wonder about when I'm bicycling past. Apparently, I'm not the only one who wonders what's up.

UPDATE: Povo's Max Metral writes in response to this post.

Yeah, the chicken and egg problem that is this business (povo) is what took us from last summer until now to sort out. Not to say we've solved the problem, just that we're ready to take a run at it. I agree that this is the problem with UGC, users don't want to generate a totality of information, they just want to sprinkle pixie dust here and there. So we as a company are trying to tackle the ones where some technical, financial, or structural legwork can have some amplified effect on the content. Parks was a good example, various cities have spreadsheets or KML files of parks, and if we can spend a little time getting them into the common format of Povo, it provides value from day 1, and strongly encourages people to sprinkle more pixie dust by tagging, taking photos, making povo search engines, etc.

Anyhow, thanks for taking a look, and hope that eco-friendly Cambridge dinner search works out.