1 - History
January 25, 2020 - Your most viewed single photo?
When reading through the many fantastic achievements and seeing so many great photos on Connect I wondered which single photo achieved the most views! At the time, late January 2020, mine had 1.2+ million views. However, it wasn’t the number of views that sparked my interest. What I wondered about was the fact that this wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, what I thought was my best photo, in fact, far from it. Also, it wasn’t of some great café or restaurant, nor of a delicious plate of great food or drink, or an amazing landscape, building, or sculpture! It was just a rather unimpressive photo I took inside a local hardware store!!! So I wondered, what was behind this or was it simply that we would never know which of our photos would become our star! Is there a reason why quite often the least expected photo can be the star? I posted about this in January, 2020 and so the journey began!
July 23, 2020 - Leaderboards of the Most Viewed Photos
MyJanuary post generated quite a lot of interest and I wanted to know if more Local Guides had the same experience so in July 2020, while in COVID-19 lockdown, I decided to create a leaderboard of the most viewed photos! Within a month the Leaderboards of the Most Viewed Photos post hit the 100,000 character limit for posts on Connect. I hit the limit but had many more Local Guides expressing interest to participate. I was forced to make some dramatic changes! I deleted as much as I could from the posts so that I could add more of these interested LGs. It was obvious that the Connect forum was not designed for what I was doing and I wanted to do even more! Connect has been designed more like a typical blog, with posts containing, messages, comments and photos. It just wasn’t designed for adding large tables with lots of numerical data and links! It also only allowed for some basic HTML and I needed more to build the tables. I invested some time to learn more about this which allowed me to squeeze a small number of additional Local Guides onto the leaderboards however by early September I struggled to even add one more. So, after giving it a lot of thought…
September 8, 2020 - Leaderboards of Photo Views
In early September, 2020, I decided to split the post into two parts, the first essentially keeping the part that focused on each LG’s single star photo and stripping out the part that focused on all photos into a second thread. These essentially came to be known as the Star Photos and the new Photo Views leaderboards. Well it didn’t take long for interest in these to grow with hundreds of Local Guides joining in.
The general idea behind these leaderboard posts is to examine and evaluate the performance of our photo contributions on Maps and to explore how we can measure and improve the performance of our photos. The analysis is based on the data provided by Connect Local Guides and not data scraped by me off publicly available information. As well as interesting detailed leaderboard rankings of this data, the posts encouraged discussion and engagement between LGs and believe me since inception, there has been a lot of this!!!
Manual data collection
Also, other than the view count of the star photos, with permission, for the first 12 months I was collecting all the photo views data from both the Connect and Maps profiles of all participating Local Guides. In the beginning, the leaderboards were being produced weekly then in February 2021 this moved to monthly. However, because this was all being done manually, even with the aid of spreadsheets, it became a very time consuming job.
July 2021 - Google Form introduced for data entry
With some 100 new participants in July 2021 alone, participating Local Guides were asked to enter their data via a Google form. This proved to be a major exercise of its own because I hadn’t ever done this before. It was a steep learning curve and the form was complex and needed to handle many different situations and explain things in some detail as the skill level of participating Local Guides was quite varied. As well as capturing data entry errors, it also needed to detect any cheating! In July 2021 I released this for beta testing. Refined a few times, the form had been in operation until March 2022.
I thought that the Google Form would save a lot of time but in reality it didn’t. It just made things more convenient but it shifted the problems from one area to another with quite a bit of time still needed to be spent in “cleaning” the data. Of course, having the data is one thing but the time and effort required to generate the leaderboards and create these on Connect continued.
July 22, 2021 - The new Points Leaderboards.
Having always realized that as they just focused on photo views, both thePhoto Views and Star Photos leaderboards had something missing, namely, contribution points! Hence in July 2021, after a year of experience creating leaderboards, I decided to launch a new stream of leaderboards that look at Local Guide points and the contributions that go to make up those points. The Points leaderboards were born! As the number of participating Local Guides grew, the time and effort required to build and maintain the leaderboards also grew. It was time to drop the Google form and get serious!
April 8, 2022 - A new Data Entry System
After 3 months of research and development, on April 8, 2022 I ditched the Google Form and introduced a purpose developed data entry system. I designed this to overcome the many shortcomings of the previous Google Form, and to make the data entry easier, simpler and faster for participating Local Guides. It also needed to significantly improve data validation functionality so as to eliminate data entry errors. I also wanted a much better foundation for new and exciting features that I wanted to introduce.
August 9, 2022 - Country Leaderboards
One shortcoming of the Points, Photo Views and Star Photos leaderboards is that they don’t give any consideration to the respective country location of participating Local Guides. In this way, Local Guides in say a smaller country such as Cameroon, Nepal, Rwanda, or one where there are significantly less guiding opportunities, would have less chance of gaining enough points or photo views than those in larger countries such as the United States, Canada, France or UK. It therefore followed that Local Guides in these smaller countries had less chance of getting onto the Points, Photo Views and Star Photos leaderboards! Therefore, on the second anniversary of the first leaderboards a new set of country based leaderboards were introduced.
December 2, 2022 - New Country Summary Leaderboard
Building on the foundation of the first Country leaderboards, in December 2022 I introduced a new Country Summary leaderboard but unfortunately we once again hit Connect’s 100,000 message character limitation. and so unfortunately I had to split it into two parts! Notwithstanding it was well received by many Local Guides but this limitation poses a serious issue for a number of future planned releases.
The leaderboards are more than just about Local Guide rankings!
As well as covering the basic essential data including the number of points and the number of photo views of participating Local Guides, together with the significant data entry and validation improvements introduced by the new system, new features were introduced to provide even more interesting metrics to help better monitor Local Guide contributions and to show how and where improvements could be made.
Conclusion
So where are we now? Well today we have these 8 different streams of Top 100 Local Guides leaderboards, each drilling down into a myriad of interesting analysis of our Maps contributions and showcasing the best Local Guides. In the following sections I’ll describe the common features of these as well as the important differences. As well as this, I’ll cover topics such as how to join, how to update your data, Frequently Asked Questions and the participation rules, terms and conditions. Enjoy!