London [de]tour guide 2012

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So I've recently started working with a collaborative group on a project that brings me full circle on the social media olympic theme. You see, I started to learn everything I could about social media in order to get participants for my We Are Watching art project that was in tandem with the 2010 Olympics, here in Vancouver. At the same time a group of friends and colleagues had started a collaborative mapping project called [de]tour 2010 that served to propose an alternative points of interest map to the official, tightly governed and packaged view of Vancouver during the Olympics. It was simple, people were invited to add their own points of interest to a Google Map. People were also encouraged to have "mapping parties", of which I had an opportunity to participate. Now, here we are on the Open Ceremonies Day for the 2012 Olympics in London, and I have been asked to put my social media skills to use to help launch a new version of this project in the UK.

So, I am back to following Olympic hashtags and persuading people to participate...so if you would like to participate, here is how:

Our goal is to make these the most popular user-created maps on Google.

Click to our maps:

Enjoy our maps by following our links, the more you click, the higher our Google ranking will increase.

Add to our maps:

Add your favourite and topical point of interest to our map.

Link to our maps:

Send your friends to our maps by adding links to our map on your website or blog to help our Google rating and to increase our traffic.

Add our RSS feed to your reader: 

Any new additions will automatically sent to the RSS feed reader of your choice.

Rate our maps:

You can rate and comment on our maps by using this link:http://ow.ly/covzq

But, following Google’s Terms of Service (ToS), don’t click or link to the maps through any automated process (such as having a computer program click the links for you). Not only will Google detect these attempts and ignore them, Google may also block any site they consider to be in violation of their ToS.

Basically, share, share, share, so that our SEO goes through the roof and places us within the mainstream search results.

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