Linking Local - The wikiDOMO Blog

Announcing wikiDOMO Award Winners from Food and Drink Fest 2010

George Bernard Shaw said that "there is no love sincerer than the love of food". We think that is especially the case for the locally grown, locally made food. This was the second year we sponsored the best of local foods, as showcased at the Food and Drink Fest... the Festival with Taste! 

 

The fifth annual Food and Drink Fest is put together by our friends at Beau Monde Productions, and the interest was so high that this year that the show had to be held at the Hamilton's Copps Colosseum. Taking place this past weekend (April 9-11), the show featured more than 140 exhibitors, live entertainment, cooking demonstrations, and just a great atmosphere. Over the three days, hundreds voted for the wikiDOMO awards, and on Sunday, we announced the winners.

The great story that captured the hearts was that of a young entrepreneur, Marzena B, who was participating for the first time at an event of this nature. Young Marzena launched her dream of running a restaurant by taking over Cafe Palazzo (612 Upper James St., Hamilton), an old Italian eatery, about two years ago. She runs it with her mother, sister and a close-knit crew like a typical family restaurant. Since the time she has taken over Cafe Palazzo, the place has won over the palates of many who come here for real ‘home-made-style’ Italian food. 

 

It came as no big surprise when Cafe Palazzo was voted the Best Food Experience Award – many could not get enough of the scrumptious lasagna and gnocchi. 

The wikiDOMO Award for Best Overall experience went to Dyment's Farm Market & Bakery. The charming ladies that ran the booth had people eating out of their hands, and not just butter tarts and wickedly delicious pies.

 

Other winners also included Better Bitters Brewing Company (Nickelbrook), a local microbrewery that won the Best Beer Experience, and The Kirkwood Group (Yellow Tail), which won the Best Wine Experience.

 
 
 

Congratulations again to all the winners! What a great weekend!

By: Dragan Stojanovic

Organizing the organizers: Wikis to the rescue!

We've all been watching and reading the latest news reports from Haiti and the terrible consequences of the January 12th earthquake. But, there is also an important story behind the news. 

When disasters strike, most media coverage is focused (and rightly so) on the immediate needs of the relief efforts: locating victims, collecting and distributing food/water/medical supplies, and providing shelter. But, what about the effort required to keep all the rescue teams organized? And, what happens when more and more of the relief efforts are supported by virtual teams of people working all around the world? How do they keep organized?

That is exactly the issue faced by a new type of relief effort sweeping the cities across the world. Organized around local events called Crisis Camps (and organized by Crisis Commons), a whole movement of volunteers is using technology and mobilizing to help. And, the results are pretty impressive, as can be seen from this news coverage from a recent Crisis Camp held in Washington, DC.

But, with hundreds of volunteers working on dozens of projects all over the world, how do they keep organized and focused? There are many tools to help individuals and groups communicate and share knowledge/ideas (e.g. IRC chat, skype, Google Docs, etc). However, the most robust, flexible, and easy to use tool is still a central wiki http://wiki.crisiscommons.org, which anyone can access and contribute to. 

It is true that most "off-the shelf" and freely-available wiki solutions are not perfect for this purpose: there is often lack of structure from ad-hoc contributors; there is no easy way to assign tasks and track their progress; and, data is often difficult to aggregate and extract in meaningful ways. Yet, despite these problems, the underlying characteristics of wikis are certainly well aligned with the needs of crisis relief: they are quick to edit, flexible, and generally open to all. When disaster strikes and large numbers are mobilized to help, these are certainly huge strengths. 

So, if you are interested in helping out with Crisis Camps, find one in your community (yes, you can find the details on the wiki at http://wiki.crisiscommons.org, or follow twitter hash-tag #ccHaiti). Since we are based in Toronto, we are involved in Crisis Camp Toronto, and are looking forward to the next one on Saturday, January 30th. Hope to see you there (in person, or online - maybe with your contributions on the wiki)!

By: Dragan Stojanovic

wikiDOMO Kicks Off Spring with 12 New Features

We are very happy to announce the launch of our Alpha 3 release. It is still very much work-in-progress, but we are happy to bring forward some important new features. 

Last few months have been really rewarding. We’ve seen amazing growth in users coming to wikiDOMO to find and promote local businesses and organizations. We have also talked to many of you about what you liked and what you still needed, so we are really excited and happy to bring you 12 new features. So what did we do?

We’ve made it easier to find the “best” Places and People. Listings are based on ratings, so you see the best-rated places first.   

We’ve enhanced the Place profiles so now you can:

1 – edit the “About” section

2 – edit the “Related Places” section and connect organizations through typical relationships 

3 – edit the “Hours” section

4 - edit the “Policies” section (must be logged-in)

5 – edit the “FAQ” section (must be logged-in)

6 - comment on Place reviews

7 – see the limited “Products” section (currently limited to alcoholic beverages)

We’re introducing very limited Product profiles (it's just a start) so now you can: 

8 – see limited Product descriptions and prices (currently limited to alcoholic beverages)

9 – rate available Products (still limited to alcoholic beverages)

This is our first - and small - step into what we hope will be a powerful product promotions tool. 

We're enhancing People profile functionality so now you can: 

10 - edit People information (must be logged-in)

11 – rate and review People

12 – comment on People reviews

We’ll be posting more detailed information on individual features in the coming blog posts (and will continue to make improvements to them). For now, just jump in, try out the features, and keep spreading the love about your favorite places. 

Oh, and drop by the wikiDOMO profile to leave us your feedback and thoughts!  

By: Dragan Stojanovic

wikiDOMO's Tastiest Awards

It's a tough job... 

... steak and lobster... coconut shrimp... best wines of the Niagara region...  mmmmmm!

We really wanted to recognize some of the best restaurants in the region, so what better place to do this than at the Food and Drink Fest... the Festival with Taste! The event took place this past weekend (March 27th to 29th) at the Hamilton Convention Centre! Our friends at Beau Monde Productions always put on a great show, and we all thought this show pushed the bar up even higher.

We sponsored awards in 3 categories: Tastiest Dish, Best Unique Dish, and Best Customer Service. 

As with all things wikiDOMO, everyone had a chance to vote and have their voice heard. Hundreds of happy show-goers stopped by the wikiDOMO booth to cast their ballots and chat about their favourites. So, you can understand, we had to try out the common favourites... so we can talk about them of course. I told you it was a tough job!

We presented the awards on Sunday. And the winners are... (drum-roll please):

Tastiest Dish:

1st place: SB Prime

2nd place: My-Thai Restaurant

3rd place: Sizzle Steakhouse

Best Unique Dish:

1st place: SB Prime

2nd place: My-Thai Restaurant

3rd place: Kookaburra Restaurant

Best Customer Service:

1st place: La Piazza

2nd place: Sizzle Steakhouse

3rd place: SB Prime

So, what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Got your other favourites? You can find them and rate them now. 

Personally, I'm not crazy about super spicy food, but Hot Mama's Foods got it going on! That's some great hot sauce! How about you? What are your favourites?

By: Dragan Stojanovic

Rate your fiance's cooking? Has wikiDOMO gone too far?

Ok, then how about rating the marriage proposal itself? Yes, on a scale of 1 to 10 – wikiDOMO style.

That’s exactly what we did this past weekend at the Hamilton-Halton Fall Wedding Show. Our friends at Beau Monde Productions put on a great show as record numbers turned out at the Hamilton Convention Centre for all things “wedding”.

It was all in good fun, as we put eight couples in front of hundreds of "fans" and through the “wikiDOMO Rating Challenge”. They showed off how well they really know each other – or not!

A highlight for me was a great couple where a man of wisdom rated his fiancé’s cooking as “8”. When poked further by our energetic host, he admitted that “her cooking is not good, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings” (I’m paraphrasing here). If we all could, I think he deserved a “10” for that answer! Even better was the fact that his fiancé actually rated her own cooking at a … well, it was actually off the wikiDOMO scale… a zero! It’s a good thing that the prizes for our four winning couples included dinners at some great local restaurants, including Pastacino and La Piazza Allegra.

So, where is the feature to rate your spouse’s cooking on wikiDOMO? If you want to score brownie-points, or just make a point… we are going to stay out of that one for now! But, if your spouse is a chef or cooks as a business, then we’ll have some good news for both of you soon.

Congratulations and a lifetime of happiness to all our winning couples!

By: Dragan Stojanovic

Development Update... Finally!

It’s been a number of months since we launched our Alpha 1 version of the http://wikiDOMO.com site. I’ve been getting questions from colleagues and friends about the status of the project. It’s been harder to keep everyone up to speed then I had expected. Our newsletter didn’t function as we had hoped – damn email filters!

Now that we’ve got this blog, I hope to be able to keep everyone current on our developments. We’ve got a lot to catch up on, so we’ll be doing a number of posts to get everyone who’s interested up to speed.

One of the big changes was parting ways with our CTO, Bogdan Arsenie. Bogdan signed with us back in November of 2007, and was instrumental in setting up the development environment as well as finding our lead developer Ronny Quint. We thank him for both and wish him good luck.

We have since brought on a number of new developers and are starting to really cook. There are more posts to come about the team and the development – stay tuned.

If you know of someone that could fill our CTO role, let us know.

By: Jose Leal

What does 'wikiDOMO' mean?

We wanted the name to capture the essence of what we're about. So, it can be broken down into two parts.

“wiki” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki) refers to the collaborative nature of wikiDOMO. We believe in the power of shared knowledge and community. To us, “wiki” means consumer contributions, mass collaboration, and most of all, consumer control. And, since everyone knows something that can be useful to others, we strongly believe that anyone should be able to easily create, edit, and share.

“DOMO” is about the focus on places, people, and things that are close to where we all actually live – close to home (DOMO is Latin for “home”). It's about everything close to you, where you shop, where you work, where you have fun, where you live - your community. 

What do you think of the name "wikiDOMO"? Let us know (ok, so we probably won't change it, but we'd like to know your thoughts anyway).

By: Dragan Stojanovic

Why build wikiDOMO?

   

No, really… why?
Simple: it is really hard to find and share good local information about things that matter to our every day lives. The goal of wikiDOMO is to make it super-easy.

For example, how did you find out about your favorite local restaurant? Caring family doctor, or a terrific soccer league close to home? How about a great deal on the coolest phone, those perfect lawn-chairs, or… well… you fill in the blank?

The truth is that it probably took quite a bit of time, different sources, and a bit of luck as well. And we all had some bad experiences in the process that we wish we knew about, and ones we still warn others about (yes, we will be sharing some of our best/worst with you soon, and look forward to yours!).

Our goal: the most convenient and extensive source of local information
We want to make it easy to find the local information we are all looking for: not only organizations, but also their people, and the products and services that they provide – in one place. So, whether you are looking for a great banquet hall, the best dentist, or a soothing massage at the best price, you will be able to find it on wikiDOMO. You will also be able to share your experiences with others, and help them as they have helped you. That’s the goal. We still have a way to go… so, back at it.

By: Dragan Stojanovic