h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm typing this while having lunch with Sean, Tim and Adam, in the pub.

That's all I really wanted to say.

Oh, how strange. I bet I know exactly where you were sitting, too.

Wait, no, it's Friday. You must've been at the other place, right?

Oddly enough it wasn't the other place, it was the usual place, which was being unusually quiet for a Friday.

Great though it was to see h2g2 working wirelessly, I couldn't help feeling that it only served to emphasise how little there is in the guide that would be actually useful in a hand-held device

A number of times on my way to the office I've been stopped by tourists asking for directions to places I know are probably nearby - Virginia Woolf's house in Bloomsbury, or a banquet hall in Endell St. for example.

I'd love to have been able to fish out the guide and find an answer. Instead I had to make do with pointing the former at Dillons and the latter at a traffic warden (meter maid).

Sean.

It's not useful yet, but we're working on it. It's only been 5 months--we're just laying the foundations...

Concerning that… when the amount of stuff here has built up, especially in the areas concerning actualy physical entities that may be visited by people, will there be a map? A nice, hi-resolution, streetname-including map with little labelled flashing dots acting as hyperlinks for things described and reviewed in h2g2 and non-flashing dots for major things that are still not yet reviewed? When multi-level tagging is implemented it might be useful for the side of the page to carry a link to a map of the relevant town, city or country wherein the subject if the article abides. To come at it from the other way it might be possible to enter your location into the guide, state the radius of the search and be rewarded with all h2g2-reviewed establishments and phenomena within that radius, should one be at a loss of what to do in one's present location. Hmmm.

Ignore the y at the end of actual. Typo.

We'll be introducing location tagging of information in our next big upgrade. It's part of the categorisation of the Guide that everyone here is thinking hard about, and it'll work much as you suggest - it might be even cooler if your handheld device has GPS built in, and knows exactly where it is. It could show you all the information relevant to the immediate area you're in.

Naturally, for this to be at all useful, the density of information in the Guide will have to increase hugely, but then, that's your job, isn't it?

What are you doing here? You should be in the hospital, making insensate gurgling noises and knitting little pink things with string trailing off one end. Congratulations and many happy returns.
Cars already have the GPS-combined-with-streetmap thing if you've got the money. Handheld GPS units still seem a little big, though one would hope they shrink in the same manner as other things. Read the Red/Green/Blue Mars series by Kim Stanley Robertson for lots of stuff about little wrist units that do every conceivable thing.
As for increasing the available knowledge, I'll get back to it. I hope it's become a condition of TDV contracts that anyone going on holiday has to come back with at least one review of something for each day they were away. Which pub were you writing that entry in and does it have a review? What's the food like? I know you're busy but you must set an example. Then again, you might not want hordes of hero-worshipping field researchers disrupting your lunchbreak.

> Which pub were you writing that entry in and does it have a review?

It's our local, and as such we'd prefer not to broadcast its whereabouts!

On the other hand, it has recently attracted particularly sleazy, weasely clientel that you really wouldn't want to share a room with, so perhaps its anonimita isn't worth preserving ...

Very wise.

From what I remember, it's not in Edinburgh. I won't get any more specific than that, promise. Besides, I can't remember the name any more. Dammit.

I was only trying to get the PTB, who are rich and have seen many things to review them before they drop hints about wanting us to write more. Never mind.

Good point. I was just deviating to make Sean nervous.

There are better ways of making people nervous than that. Secretly infiltrate anywhere he shops, swap any cheese he attempts to buy with special cheese and during his subsequent dreams, convince him that the last ten years of advances in computers were all in his imagination. Watch as he nervously enters the workplace, convinced he'll be using a 286 with a whopping 1Mb of RAM and a 20Mb hard drive. See if he arrives with a wheelbarrow to take a laptop to the pub at lunchtime.

Yes, but I live 9000 miles away. Tough to do the cheese-swap in a case such as mine.

What even with your amazing supernatural sun god powers?

Making the sun shine every day and swapping cheese are two very, very different things, Ant.

I doubt that it's necessary to do any cheese-swapping to wind Sean up.

Plans are afoot to get much more review-type information into the Guide. I suspect the 'no advertising' caveat in the T&Cs has actually put off some people from talking about specific places or goods. But that's what we want. The 'no advertising' rule means you can't advertise your own products, but you're free (and will be encouraged) to write reviews about anything. There's a huge virtue in getting unbiased consumer reports, and the Guide will benefit from that kind of thing.

Oh, good, I have just the one, then.