Hi!
My name is Rafael Otegui, I am a journalist and writer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. This January -summer here- I was on vacation in Mar del Plata, a coastal city in my country, and every time I visited a tourist site, Google Maps invited me to share a review. In general, there was already information about these places, standardized descriptions of the type: nice atmosphere, good service, the steak a overcooked. Useful data, no doubt. So I asked myself: what can I do to contribute differently? And I replied: my poetry, my style.
I confess I didn’t use the tool much until then (I’m new to this). But I said to myself: Google Maps can not only be useful, it can also be beautiful, it can mobilize the imagination. So I wrote a couple of reviews and shared them on Twitter. The result was surprising: in a couple of hours, the tweet had more than 16,000 likes, 1,620 RT and close to 883,000 impressions. Maybe it is not much for you, but it is a lot for me. My first viralization!
People started asking me to write a book just for reviews. Many said they were going to replicate my style, because they were bored of always reading the same thing. And then something even more surprising happened: an important Argentine writer and writer’s coach, Santiago Llach, used my reviews as a writing task and asked his more than 150 students to write reviews on Google Maps following my example. The result: hundreds of people writing their reviews on the same map, sharing them with each other, feeding the platform with literature.
That was wonderful! Suddenly we were hundreds of people writing reviews, turning Google Maps into a great geolocated collective novel. With useful information, real, checked, but also beautiful. Because people also need beauty, people also need poetry. In conclusion, and in response to the question asked for the application to participate in Connect Live 2020, the most important thing I have done as a Local Guide is to have inspired other local guides to write their reviews with a good dose of literature and to have collaborated so that Google Maps provide a meaningful and enjoyable reading experience.
Cheers!
