The community grows, and every day new Local Guides join Connect, our Global Village, “the Home of Local Guides” as I like to call it.
So while our friend @SholaIB welcomes all of us with his beautiful post, I want to invite you to reflect for a moment on the purpose and meaning of being a community.
To start I would like to take a cue from the Local Guides Help Page, as always:
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Local Guides is a global community of explorers who write reviews, share photos, answer questions, add or edit places, and check facts on Google Maps. Millions of people rely on contributions like yours to decide where to go and what to do. (source: Overview)
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Local Guides Connect is an online forum where you can get to know other Local Guides, share your discoveries, keep up to date on the latest product info, and more. You can also suggest improvements for the Local Guides program and features on Google Maps. In addition, many Local Guides visit Connect to learn more about photography, food, and travel. (Source: Local Guides Connect)
Explorers, I believe that the key to what we do is precisely this: to explore the places around us, to discover what others have not yet seen. A few days ago I wrote a post on ancient maps, and I could not help imagining these explorers setting out into the unknown, to discover what lay beyond the known world. On their return they shared their discoveries with others, and slowly reconstructed the representation of the world on the maps.
Exploring, discovering and sharing, these were, and still are, the key words of this adventure.
I cannot help but appreciate the commitment of these few adventurers who set out into the unknown. They have laid the foundations, while now 150 million new explorers are busy adding all the details of a world map no longer unknown, but on the contrary increasingly rich in details.
How does all this relate to Connect? And with this I also try to answer a question that is asked very often: “Why doesn’t Connect have an App?”
I try to explain it with an image, which shows how the map, in addition to being “shown”, is also “told” in great detail.
The cartographer Paolino Veneto at the beginning of the 14th century told us that: “Writing without the aid of painting will not be enough to make us quickly see the boundaries of the provinces in their various parts”
Today we could affirm that: “The image without the aid of writing will not be enough to make us fully understand what we are looking at”
Can you imagine the same map represented like this? Would it have been useful?
I believe it would have been perfectly useless. The same is also true for us, modern explorers, who have the desire to be able to be guides for others.
As I said already: “The image without the aid of writing will not be enough to make us fully understand what we are looking at”
As Local Explorers and Guides, we share our content with others so that others can fully understand it.
We come from different countries, with different cultures, art, traditions, and climate.
Making sure that others can fully understand what we are saying means providing information and details that seem obvious to us, but which for others may be completely new and unknown.
For this reason Connect provides us with a web platform in which we can write contents that are real articles, with the possibility of formatting the text and inserting images in the most appropriate position, with a minimum of 100 characters in length.
For this reason, Maps gives us a bonus of 10 points if our reviews are longer than 200 characters.
Connect is an opportunity to write, and to describe our world in words and images.
Don’t know how to do it?
One of Connect’s moderators, @AdrianLunsong , is a writing master, and it’s a pleasure and an honor for me to share some of his posts.
- 30 Days, #30Reviews! Are you up for this challenge?!
- How to write a great post - Basic Tips
- How to write a great post - Intermediate Tips
- How to write a great post - Advanced Tips
I am sure that his valuable advice will make you understand why “No, Connect is not an App”
Share your World: It doesn’t matter if you are a storyteller, a traveler or a foodie. There is no limit to what we Local Guides can share in our world. Food, culture, art, traditions, history, territory are all welcome, as long as our contents have been entirely created by us. Are you ready?
If you want to start by finding out how I use Connect, well it’s easy, just click HERE.
I can’t wait to read your stories, your adventures, your way of being Local Guides.
You can of course reply to this post, and share your opinion or, if you have any doubts, ask for an explanation.
We will be happy to answer.
What do you say? My world? This one, of course
