The Everywhere blog

A member of the the Everywhere community emailed me recently with some questions about the virtues of being the discoverer of a new Place. To paraphrase, the question basically was: If I'm the person who discovers a Place, does that make it more likely that my contribution will get published?

Actually, there's no advantage to being the discoverer of a Place from the standpoint of getting in the magazine. Yes, you get the ego gratification of knowing that you found it first. And yes, you'll get credit for that in perpetuity. But when we decide what goes in the magazine, we don't look at who discovered the Place, but rather, what Places are interesting and what photos and postcards about popular Places are most interesting within the Place listing.

In fact, rather than competing with one another to discover Places, you're actually working together to make Places popular. The more content -- photos, postcards, etc. -- submitted to a Place, the more interesting it becomes to other members of the community. And thus the more interesting the Place becomes according to the "hotness" algorithm we use to help determine what goes in the magazine.

Where you *are* competing with one another is for rankings *within* the Place. Readers can vote on individual photos, Postcards, and descriptions within a Place listing, and the ones with the most votes appear first. So the photo with the most votes becomes the default image, and the Postcard with the most votes runs at the top, and so on.

Bottom line: Discovering a Place is good, but providing detailed material about a Place, whether it's a new Place or pre-existing Place, is most important of all.

(Image above: Christopher Columbus, via the Wikipedia.)