A new website covering every block of Boston that presents itself as a Wikipedia for the city offers visitors a native Bostonian’s insight on everything from pubs to parking lots and park benches, creators claim.
Launched just a few days ago, povo.com, named for the Portuguese word for “people,” has a page for every street, block, neighborhood and geographic landmark in the Boston area.
Max Metral, one of the websites creators, said the site’s platform has “real local content,” instead of the typical restaurant and hotel reviews given on other travel websites.
Metral said the idea came to povo co-creator Hasty Granbery when he was looking for a specialized drycleaner in San Francisco. Web searches were not giving Granbery the results he wanted, Metral said, so he turned to Wikipedia.
“He thought applying the Wiki philosophy to local search might be a powerful way to build a new local reference guide,” Metral said.
Other than user-generated and -edited content, search engines on the site can point users towards ATM locations and cheap parking spaces in a designated area, Metral said.
“We want to be able to find parking garages, dentists, apartments, and parks, just as much as pubs, restaurants and hotels,” he said.
Metral said the company is marketing Povo through blogs and websites like Facebook. Povo interns take pictures of streets and talk to business owners about the site, he said.
“We hope that by getting our message out there, people will come to Povo already knowing it’s a site they can control, evolve, and improve,” he said.
Stacy Shreffler, spokeswoman for BostonUSA, a tourism agency, said the Internet has had a significant impact on the nature of the industry.
“We see a lot of these companies at the forefront of how people travel,” she said.
College of Communication junior Natalie Orphanos said a “Boston-centric” wiki-site is a good idea.
“I always have questions about things in Boston that the city website does not help me with,” she said. “Or if it does help me, I often end up looking on the site way longer for my answer than I should have to.”