April 22, 2009 It's not that we've been doing nothing, but most of our recent activity has been behind the scenes or sales oriented. We're picking up the pace on the site a little bit. Today, Hasty changed the search box on the home page to search tags, listings, and places (e.g. streets, addresses, land cover) all at the same time. This is the first step towards merging the "what/where" boxes into a single box. We've been back and forth on this a million times, and probably will continue to do so, but try out the triple search box and let us know how it feels.

March 13, 2008 Information on parks and recreation facilities are available in a variety of places and in a variety of formats, but we found them poorly organized and difficult to use. The facts are out there, but there had to be a better way for people to access it. We gathered the information and entered into Povo to create what we believe is the best and most complete guide to Boston area parks: Show parks in Boston You can continue to refine your search of parks by clicking on tags (in the right hand column)... Find parks with both a basketball court (for me) and a play structure (for my kids). We have Boston and Cambridge information, perhaps you could help out by entering parks in other areas? Or better yet if you know who in your town or city government has this information, let us know!

April 7, 2008 Burts Bees is a brand of all natural personal care products. They are sold at a suprising number of Boston area retailers, but not everywhere. Dr. Hauschka is an all natural and organic skin care line that is much harder to find. Both of them were suggested by a friend of Povo. So let's say you hear about their products and would like to try them. How do you know which stores carry the brand and where they're located? Does the CVS down the street carry them, or do you have to make a trip to a specialty store? Or maybe you're on your way home and you need that particular brand of diaper cream (haven't we all been there? No? ok.)... It's not that this search is the be all and end all of Povo, but it's a new way of thinking about how to use it. It's not just the locations, it's the obscure, rare or unique features of that place.

June 27, 2008 Povo is a Creative Commons work, meaning you can take our content and reuse it for free as long as you give us attribution. Because of this, we generally try to "internalize" anything in Povo, such as images, so that you can be sure the work is "complete." We still think this is a goal, but we also have to be realistic. For example, you can embed You Tube videos, but we don't load them into our database. This is partly because we consider YouTube a "stable" content reference: they're unlikely to go out of business anytime soon. Today, we have also created a "super template" (templates that use things like Javascript or special server code) for embedding RSS feeds. The original intent is for things like news stories or blog entries which are not meant to be searchable or persistent on Povo. For example, here's this page as a feed in itself: Or a feed of news stories purporting to be about the Back Bay (from [1]):

April 22, 2009 We'll be moving our feedback "systems" to [1] over the next weeks. It's not that we have a huge customer support load, but they just seem to have a nice set of tools and a "public forum" mindset that matches well with Povo. See you there, and ask some questions so we don't look so new.

July 1, 2008 Povo is an ever-evolving guide to Boston, and obviously it's very early in our lifetime. So we know there are times when we might not have a listing, or our text search doesn't understand some crazy misspelling (this is a really hard problem, if you are a Lucene expert, contact us!). So we've added Google Local Search results to our search results page. If you get no results from us, we'll automatically run the Google search. If you get some results, you have the option to run the Google search at the bottom of that page. We hope this gives you even more reasons to go to Povo first.

June 26, 2008 Whenever somebody uses a Template or makes a link to a Povo title, we keep a "map" of all those associations. This is the foundation of how our custom search engines (like the Parking Search) work. Many times, people make links or call templates that don't exist yet, intending to create them later. Of course, this doesn't always actually get done, and so you end up with "broken" links and templates. So, we have two pages to help see those things now:

• The Broken Links Page
• The Broken Templates Page

April 7, 2008 For fun, we built a heatmap of all of Hillary’s travels as First Lady. Heatmaps are a way to visualize the concentration of things over an area. Povo heatmaps fully integrate with Povo content so you can see any search or even page as a heatmap. Soon, you'll also be able to embed these heatmaps in your blog or personal site. Perhaps it was obvious to you that she went to Europe a lot, but you can also filter and drill down by time or geography to see where she concentrated. And if you have or know of similar information on Obama or McCain, let's try it out. The Hillary page is just a regular Povo page, so you could "import" data like this yourself if you're handy with a scripting tool of your choice. In this case we just created a section for every trip she took. The filtering (tag filter), mapping, and heatmaps come automatically.

April 27, 2009 You probably were only marginally aware you had a member page (www.povo.com/~yourpovoname). We have lots of work to do to make that an interesting place to put relevant information about yourself, but I guess we have to start somewhere. I (djMax) wanted to put the music I'm listening to on my page, so I added the [1] widget as a template. Very simple usage:

{{Povo:Secure Templates/LastFm | Username = whatever}}

See the example at right.

April 8, 2008 The Marathon is a uniquely Boston event. We put together a mile-by-mile guide that lets people post their insights about each mile of marathon. Since it's wiki-based, anyone can make edits to the site and add content. Spectators can find the best place to watch. Runners can learn what to expect on race day. Those who plan to watch the race can do local searches around any mile marker on the course to find places to park, plus bars, restaurants or anything else that they might want or need on race day. But by far the coolest feature is the ability for someone to virtually "run" the second half of the marathon course from Mile Marker 14 through the Finish. What better way to get ready for race day?