A short while ago Fitzroyalty thought that I might be up to the challenge of building some sort of site that churned out lists all of the unreviewed restaurants in Melbourne.
I quite clearly wasn’t. I tried a few approaches and none were at all accurate. I couldn’t think of an immediate way to legally make money from it and lost all motivation.
In its stead, here is a bundle of RSS feeds that grabs new restaurants from Urbanspoon that have never been reviewed by a food blogger whom suckles from Urbanspoon’s teat. If you subscribe, it will alert you when a new restaurant in Melbourne is added or an unreviewed restaurant is updated in the Google index, so that you can be first to post your capsule-sized review. It’s not all quality. You’ll get alerts whenever a new McDonalds graces the earth or your local milk bar gets uppity and installs a coffee machine, but you’ll soon realise that almost all of the writing about restaurants in Melbourne happens within a ten kilometre radius.
Thanks Phil – this could be really amazing if only we could get good quality data! Relying on inaccurate Urbanspoon data as an intermediary is very frustrating.
Another thing bloggers can do if they often eat out around home is search Google for “site:urbanspoon.com “Bloggers, have you reviewed this restaurant? Add your review to this page.” -“blog posts on”melbourne” and add a suburb name to the search query to find unreviewed places (according to Urbanspoon) near them.
I’m still dreaming of a Yahoo Pipe that takes the Urbanspoon data and puts it into a neat Google docs spreadsheet what we can share. But versioning and updating would become a problem too…
le docs spreadsheet what we can share. But