Google Map for independent and locally-owned businesses in the San Joaquin Valley

Community Activism Cartography:

A Guide for San Joaquin Valley Local-holics

I just started a custom Google map for Independent and Locally-owned businesses in the San Joaquin Valley. Normally, I would only include the central San Joaquin Valley, but since I made this map public (and maybe others would help add and update), then I included the whole enchilada of the San Joaquin Valley. We’ll see how it goes!

Here’s the description I wrote for it:

“Promoting local efforts, local economy and local culture in the San Joaquin Valley of central California. This list is open to the public for editing. (Please no national franchises.) Thank you for adding and updating this list!”

I have about 75 businesses that added just today, it was really easy. The larger benefit is that people (Valley residents or visitors) can use this map to purposely shop, eat and drink local.

Google’s reach is so vast that it’s been only a few hours since the Independent and Locally-owned Businesses in the San Joaquin Valley map’s birth and it’s had 442 page views. As searchers stumble upon one entry, they’ll be linked to this network of local-licious options. The way I see it, a tourist could be eating at my favorite local diner instead of Applebee’s because of this.

For Google Map newbies

For those of your unfamiliar with Google maps, the icons will link to the businesses’ name, address and website and picture if it exists. Google also aggregates as many reviews as it can find. So for Dam Diner, for instance, you can read reviews from tripadvisor.com and fresno.citysearch.com in one place.

Here’s where we come in: We can add even more! So if you have another picture of the Dam Diner, you can upload it here. You can leave a review. If Dam Diner’s information or location is out of date you can change it. Etc.

For those of you interested in contributing to this, it’s easy, you:

• Sign into a google account
• Go to the map itself
• Search for the businesses you want to list, i.e. Irene’s
• When you bring up Irene’s placemarker, click, “Save to My Maps”
• Choose “Independent and locally-owned businesses in the San Joaquin Valley”
• Add or update extra information (another review, updated hours, the businesses’ website if you like
• Feel smug!

Let me know what you think, please, I’m enamored with all this fancy Internet stuff.

 

Valley Notebook Wiki

We’ve decided to work around the technical issues of putting up a “real” website, and start housing content on a wiki: ValleyNotebook.pbwiki.com. Our idea is to create a website that houses original content and annotated links about and around the central San Joaquin Valley. I found a few today and will be adding some over the next few weeks.

• Fresno Coalition for Art, Science and History
• Discover the site for a Fresno Bee special publication that led me to a long list of notable Central Valley natives–my favorite was the link to Famous people with Valley ties: Barbara Morgan, a NASA teacher/astronaut
• attended Hoover High!

The best way to describe our project is a site dedicated to sharing the serendipity of the San Joaquin Valley. That may not make sense at first, but if you have ever had moment where you thought: “I didn’t know that about Fresno (Clovis/Kerman/Dinuba/Unincorporatedville)” then you know where we’re heading. We’re not the first to do this, nor the last. But we think it will be fun and shamelessly educational.