Local Guide (Premium)

I'm active on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Mastodon. But I use another service to reach many more people than I do via all those services combined. That’s right. I'm a local guide on Google Maps.

I know. That may seem like an odd thing for me to be doing. But it comes from a good place, and I get some useful and rewarding feedback, both from Google and from the merchants I frequent. We all want to believe that we're making a difference in some small way. And ... this is one way.

I don't recall when this started, exactly. But looking through my contributions, I see that my first review, for Rattle N Hum East in New York City, is now 7 years old. And that my first photo contribution, from café in Paris, is about the same age. Those early reviews were not particularly wordy, but I've always been more interested in the photos. (I just don't like typing in a lot of text on my phone.)

So far, I've made over 3800 contributions to Google Maps in the form of 155 reviews, 163 ratings, 2437 photos, over 1000 answers, and 55 edits. If anything, I don't contribute enough, and I can't tell you how many times I've visited the same restaurant again and again and never bothered to leave even a short review or post some photos. But despite this, my photos have been viewed almost 40 million times on Google Maps.

Right. 2400 photos. Viewed 40 million times. Incredible.

I have three photos that were viewed over 1 million times each, though two of them, oddly, are outside shots of restaurants.

From a review perspective, which again is my weak link, I'm somehow ranked in the top 10 percent of restaurant reviewers overall on Google. I'm also ranked in the top 10 percent of American restaurant reviewers and in the top 10 percent of Japanese restaurant reviewers on Google.

A couple of stories from our time here in Pennsylvania can help explain why I bother.

When we first moved here in August 2017, we were on a tight schedule for a variety of reasons, and our son Mark only had a few days here with his car before he needed to take it back to his college in New York. We were able to get him the PA license plate and registration, but we needed to get it inspected. In Massachusetts, this was easy: you could drive up to a gas station that did state inspections and do it on the spot, with the whole process possibly taking 10 minutes.

In PA, not so much: We drove around together, getting rejected at each inspection place and being told that we'd need to make an appointment that was always several days out. But we only had until the next day. We couldn't find one of these places and had parked perpendicular to the street we were on and were both looking at Google Maps on our phones to try and find it. For whatever reason, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw that the place we were looking for was across the street. "I found it," I announced. It was called Safari Automotive.

We crossed the street and spoke with the owner, Ali, and I ...