World Wide Tea Shop Map Project
Another Steepster user was asking for recommendations for places to go check out teas. It made me recall a google map I created a few years back of many tea retailers for the California Bay Area so I could easily plan my travels. I thought it might be a fun and useful project to open that map up for anyone to view or add tea shops across the world. I have the settings adjusted so that anyone with a link can view and edit. It’s pretty easy to edit. Open the map, look up a store by name or address and in the box that pops up there is an “add to map” option with space to add notes (if you choose the pencil to edit) like what type or brand is offered. That part can be helpful to people if it is a grocery store that offers a particular brand that may or may not be interesting to an individual. I thought it might be more useful than the places feature on Steepster when traveling and getting directions on your phone. Hope y’all enjoy and can get some use out of this!
https://drive.google.com/open?id=19QKigDDaeGbifGk9LIsvk6xy9nJ3Dpi7&usp=sharing
This subject has come up a couple of times. Reddit has a version of this, and of course there is an obsolete tea map version on this Steepster site too, and on Tea Chat. The founder of the Gongfu Cha FB group talked of making one of these once but never did.
It’s a great idea, it just needs a lot of input, and then to be somewhere people could actually reference it. Being connected to a group or a page would help in that second sense, but then one could become obsolete there too, or even people active in a group might not notice it. I don’t think many r/tea members in Reddit know there’s a tea map link there.
Please feel free to post the link wherever you think tea drinkers would see and use it! I searched for a map on Steepster, but didn’t see any up to date postings.
I’ve been considering how to push your version to a next level since it seems a simple, good solution. I co-founded an international theme facebook group that has over 6000 members; places like that could contribute. It’s the context of an individual hosting the map that’s problematic. It looks odd, and if you ever felt like deleting it you could. The Reddit sub-forum and here hosting maps have that other limitation; they’re tied to a limited group. I guess the different problems taken together are why at least three bersions of this map, prior to this one, already exist, and none ever amounted to much (no offense intended). I don’t know how to resolve that. It doesn’t seem like having groups like the two FB groups I mentioned help out will work to promote a personal map version.
It is a communal trust exercise. Anyone with a link can edit, so anyone with a link could delete entries. I don’t know that an individual being the host is really any more of a risk or issue with that set up. Anyone with the link can also copy the map and make their own with whatever permissions they want.
I get that. It’s hard to fully express what I mean about all the context in a few sentences here. It’s not just about the problem that people might delete the whole thing, also about how people relate to associations online. Wiki sites tend to not work because there has to be a connection to get people to contribute. Sites like Trip Advisor or Quora build in a sense of community and reward by adding versions of likes, other stats, badges to be achieved, comments feedback, and so on. Otherwise people wouldn’t do it. The Steepster, Tea Chat, and Reddit maps didn’t work because people lost track of them being there, or never knew, or never cared. It would take some degree of association with a group theme, or something like that, and also a way to raise awareness, to promote it. I’m not sure of a good solution, of where it should be, or how that should work. The other problem about anyone being able to delete it or add loads of unrelated spam might also come up.
I’ve added a few Idaho locations. Since tea shop visiting is my primary interest on vacations, I’ll try to slowly add places I’ve gone on my last several vacations (Portland, SoCal, Bay Area, mainly) as well.
I think if this thread got stickied, that could potentially help so it wouldn’t get lost and more people would add to it over time.
I can add lots, and probably will get to it, surely just not related to all the shops I’ve visited in different places, since that would take days to research. I like the approach and the initiative, with some reservations about form, which I’ve already expressed. I’ll also mention this in a blog post, since it’s an interesting subject, and will spread awareness. I have written about the other three maps I’ve mentioned, and other tea shop research options, in this post, but the basics I’ve already expressed in comments here: http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2018/03/finding-tea-shop-near-you.html
Login or sign up to leave a comment.