So why am I including the headers? Anthony T. wrote: >Path: >Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 12:02:24 -0600 >From: [email removed] (Anthony C. Tecce) >Subject: Cool new restaurant WWW site >Newsgroups: ne.food >Message-ID: >Organization: Deja News Posting Service >X-Article-Creation-Date: Tue Jul 29 14:10:01 1997 GMT >X-Originating-IP-Addr: 199.232.54.25 (mailer.hubnet.com) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I thought this was fairly interesting, given what dining site is run by hubnet, and in light of the fact that several people who post to this group were apparently email spammed by a dining site recently. >I found a pretty neat new Boston area restaurant site: >http://www.bostondine.com . >Great listing of eateries. Well, assuming this is an honest post, and not just disguised advertising for the site, I'll just say a few words about Bostondine. It isn't exactly new. It is decended from the venerable Boston Restaurant List maintained by Ellis Cohen. When the list took up too much time and energy, he sold it to the hubnet folks, who created the Boston Restaurant Guide. The Guide was pretty good for a while, probably in large part due to the enormous effort put into creating the BRL, and the great information it contained. However, there seemed to be a problem with adding new content, and the contents of the site slowly aged... Then hubnet updated the graphics, and renamed the site bostondine. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, they haven't bothered to update much of the content. When they "launched" Bostondine, I decided to check out the "new" site. I found many out-of-date entries in the list, including some restaurants which had been closed for more than 1 year. I emailed several corrections. Two months later, I still saw the same out-of-date listings (today, the ones I checked are still wrong). As an example, the page for Brookline Village contains listings for 14 restaurants. 3 of those have closed, 2 of which have been replaced (and one of the closed restaurants has been closed for approximately 2 years). The 2 replacement restaurants are not included in the listings, although I sent that information to Hubnet as well. In addition, one restaurant is listed twice. That's a pretty high error/out-of-date rate, especially when hubnet was notified (months ago in most cases) about the problems. How much effort can it take to remove restaurants which have closed? The site has some good information, and some good reviews. It has the potential to become a great site (as it once was). Unfortunately, IMHO, Bostondine contains too much out-of-date information to be a useful resource. They need to focus less on splashy graphics and more on content-- without current, accurate content there really is no reason to visit the site. IMHO, better sites include: Boston Globe reviews at http://www.boston.com Boston Phoenix reviews and dining guide at http://www.bostonphoenix.com the online Zagat Survey (which is also fairly outdated, but will hopefully be updated when the new survey is completed later this year) on Pathfinder at http://www.pathfinder.com and even Boston Sidewalk (yes, the new Microsoft-run site, which has some up-to-date information, even if I have found factual errors in, and have strong differences of opinion with, some of their reviews-- not to mention that their site has a tendency to crash Macs using Netscape) at http://boston.sidewalk.com Marcel
Boston, MA