Author: nic

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on a small visual update for VirtualGlobetrotting, which has looked more-or-less the same since 2010.

The changes are mostly cosmetic. If you find anything that doesn’t work as it should, please let me know right away.

Let me know what you think!

Happy birthday to us! 8 years old today.

Back on April 10, 2012 (our 7th anniversary), I noted that we should hit 150,000 maps by February 18, 2013. Well, everyone was super busy the last 12 months sharing all of the awesome places they’re finding — we hit 150,000 2 months early in December of 2012.

The 7th anniversary post has some fun stats of how the site has grown over time.

Thank you everyone for visiting and sharing!

VirtualGlobetrotting passed another milestone while I wasn’t looking this week, our 150,000th accepted map!

Here’s “Soccer Practice” thanks to WacoKidd110:

WacoKidd110 received a special achievement for this as well!

Hi everyone,

I want to thank everyone that took the recent VirtualGlobetrotting satisfaction survey. We had a higher-than-expected number of responses, and got a lot of great comments and feedback.

Below is a summary of the results, as well as our takeaways and how we’re going to address the feedback.

Summary

• There were over 40 responses: 22% visitors (people who haven’t contributed a map), 70% contributors, 7% moderators
• 78% of the survey responders had posted a map
• Of those who hadn’t posted, almost half thought the submission process was too difficult
• Most people were overall satisfied with the site and its components
• Areas that could use improvement were the Forums and Overall Site Design (look)
• 32% would participate in Games (Safaris, Scavenger Hunts) more if there was a small financial reward
• 60% of respondants want to keep the map rating system as-is (1-10 Stars). Other respondants were split between Facebook-style (like-only) and Reddit-style (Vote Up/Vote Down)
• 70% of respondants pay attention to their achievements and 70% want more achievements
• 55% of people read the Blog (kjfitz is doing a great job!), with 81% wanting to keep the frequency as-is
• Regarding what types of maps should be allowed:
• 65% think no maps should be rejected
• 10% think there should only be X posts per category a day for some categories
• 25% think some categories should be rejected entirely
• Only 27% of people would like to be able to hide specific categories from home page, navigation, searches automatically
• Many of the responses complaining about certaint types of posts were upset about “random” posts (i.e. a random car) vs. a specific category (i.e. celebrity homes)
• Improvements people want to see over the next few months:
• 80% want to be able to make minor edits to maps
• 43% want more than one More Info link
• 33% want to be able to customize the home page more
• 25% want to be able to re-submit rejected maps
• 23% want mobile apps

Takeaways

• We have some ideas for how to make the Submit page easier for everyone:
• Change the country, state, and categories fields to type-and-autosuggest instead of a dropdown box, so you can easily search for a word
• Updating the AutoSubmitter to be more reliable
• We’re always open to other ideas for how to make it easier — leave a comment if you have one!
• We will be working on improving the Forums and Site Design over time
• Scavenger Hunts, which we haven’t done in two years, will come back soon. We will likely offer a small financial reward for the top finishers
• We had been considering changing the rating system from 1-10 Stars to Vote Up/Vote Down, but it looks like most people want it to stay the same. We’ll still explore this possibility though
• More achievements coming!
• We will be more stringent on the “Buildings – Homes – Celebrity – Business” category, enforcing the More Info link on submission
• The next features we’ll work on are allowing users to make minor edits to their maps, and being able to add more than one More Info link
• We’re planning a mobile app that would show submitted maps around your location, and have a personal queue for maps to submit later

Thanks go out to everyone who took the survey. There were a lot more great written responses as well that we’ve taken into consideration. If you have anything specific you’d like to discuss, please reply to this post or start a new one in the Forums.

One last reminder for those who haven’t taken it yet: We’re conducting a survey to hear about what you like (and dislike) about the site, and have a few questions regarding changes we are considering and would love your input.

The survey is located here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/virtualglobetrotting2012

We will be stopping the survey on Sep 4, 2012 (2 more day). If you haven’t taken it yet, we’d really appreciate your input!

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

We would love it if you would take a few minutes out of your day to take short survey that will help us make this site better. We are interested in what you like (and dislike) about the site, and have a few questions regarding changes we are considering and would love your input.

The survey is located here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/virtualglobetrotting2012

Many thanks to all those that take it!

Seven years ago today, and only two months after Google Maps was released, VirtualGlobetrotting (then Google Globetrotting) started accepting submissions of cool locations from around the world.

Archive.org doesn’t go back to the first month of VGT’s existence, but there is a snapshot of the site after a month and 2,045 maps.

Milestone Posts
Here’s the first map (I) ever posted:

The 10,000th submitted map:

The 100,000th submitted map:

The 100,000th approved map:

Stats
At the time of this post, 133,638 maps have been submitted, or over 52 a day! At this rate, we’ll hit 150,000 by February 18, 2013 and 200,000 by October 8, 2015. And #1,000,000 will be on November 20, 2057!

VGT started out only accepting imagery from Google Maps (46,396 maps), but once MSN Virtual Earth/Windows Live Local/Windows Live Maps/Live Search Maps/Bing Maps came onto the scene, we’ve seen nearly as much satellite/aerial imagery from them (44,084 maps). Google still holds the crown of most submissions due to the very popular Street View (an additional 42,576 maps), adding to their total of 88,972 Google maps. Poor Yahoo, at 173 maps…

The most popular posts, and categories, are obviously celebrity homes. We’ve all seen Will Smith’s house a ton of times on the front page as the day’s most popular map, but here it is again in case you missed it:

The most popular non-celebrity home is #36 overall:

Did you know the most popular non-celebrity category is Buildings – Scientific – Astronomy?

Special Thanks
I wanted to thank all of the amazing contributors to this site. Year after year, you still find amazing new places to explore. I also want to thank the moderators whose dedication has made VGT an amazingly clean, fun place to visit.

What’s Next?
I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas and suggestions for how we can improve the site. Do you have ideas for a new feature? A different way of organizing submissions? Something that would make submitting maps quicker?

If you do, please let us know: http://virtualglobetrotting.uservoice.com/

Short note — kjfitz is getting back from travelling tonight, so there’s been a short delay with today’s Safari. Should be posted by tonight.

Over the past six years, VirtualGlobetrotting has had nearly 110,000 locations contributed to its database by an amazingly dedicated community. Members of our community hail from physical locations as diverse as our interests.

We have been supported by an amazing team of moderators that monitor the queue of incoming submissions to filter out spam and duplicate submissions, and their hard work and dedication has sculpted VirtualGlobetrotting into the rich informative resource that it is today.

One of the challenges that we all encounter, whether you’re a moderator or just a visitor, is how we can ensure that the site is kept at a high level of quality, while still accepting submissions from a diverse community of people spanning the globe. The moderation team has worked hard to be consistent in how we moderate incoming submissions, and we have developed a lot of guidelines over the years to ensure that submissions maintain a certain level of quality.

However, we realize that these policies and guidelines have not always been clear to visitors of the site, and for that, we apologize.

To help with this, we have made an attempt to write down all of the current guidelines and policies that moderators follow when looking over new submissions.

We have posted the new Map Submission Policies page here:
http://virtualglobetrotting.com/submit_policies/

It is also linked to from the Submit page.

We invite you to look over the policies and send us your feedback. The policies are not set in stone — we may add, remove, or change them in the future. We hope that by having them listed publicly, the moderation process can be more open and transparent to all visitors.

Thank you!
– Nic

Just 10 days before it’s 6th anniversary, VirtualGlobetrotting has finally collected all 19,709 celebrity homes in the world!

The final celebrity home was posted by neotrix on March 28th at 1:34pm:

When I created VirtualGlobetrotting 6 years ago, on April 10th, 2005, I really had no idea that we would get to this point, this soon. Who would have thought that we’d achieve a rate of over 28.4 celebrity homes per day? The dedication of the community has helped VirtualGlobetrotting reach my long term (and previously unthinkable) goal of collecting every celebrity home in the world.

I was skeptical at first, when no new celebrity homes came in for a day or two. Are we really there? Have we found them all? To be sure, I tasked our amazing team of moderators to determine if it was true. They have tireless spent the last few days scouring the all of the ends of the internet, and have concluded that yes, we really did find them all.

I don’t really know what we should do at this point. I never thought we would actually finish our collection.

Since all of the celebrity homes have been found, cataloged and accounted for, we’re a little worried about what the site will degrade into. We’ve already started seeing some people posting pictures of homes that wished they were celebrities:

And even just posts of their cats and dogs:

These are completely uninteresting to us, so please stop posting them.

It’s obvious that, at this point, people are bored with the lack of celebrity homes to post, so we’ve decided to pull the plug on all submissions officially on April 10th, 2011. The submit form will be deleted at that time. If new celebrity homes (or actual celebrities) are created between now and April 10th, please make sure to get them submitted before the submission form is deleted.

Thanks for helping us collect them all!