Partnerships

• Partnerships
• Creating & Sharing

Why partner with PublicEarth?

The independent organizations that make up our content partners are our greatest asset. Thousands of organizations in the world gather place information for members and fans, representing a broad spectrum of collections ranging from tennis courts to pottery studios to RV parks to public art.

People care about these places and passionate members of the organizations like to share information about their hobbies, to keep records up to date, and to build more accuracy into the data.

PublicEarth wants to help our partner organizations make the most of their information in a way that makes it more useful to current users, and helps more people discover these places.

We are committed to making tools that help connect people to this place information, make it clear and searchable, and widely accessible. The PublicEarth data can be another way for people to find organizations, to pursue a variety of activities, and to spark people’s desire to join these groups.

Check out a sample list of organizations that have already contributed millions of data points to PublicEarth. Do you have a great collection of information about places in your area? Is your organization the best source of data on a particular type of place? If the answer is YES! then we would be delighted if you would be a part of PublicEarth from its exciting, beginning stage.

How can you partner with PublicEarth?

We can work with your company or organization in a variety of ways.

• You can contribute content.
• You can use our content on your site via a customized PublicEarth widget.
• You can use PublicEarth to mobilize your users to contribute more content.
• You can use our content in your applications by integrating our API.
• You can use our content in your GPS device or navigation application.
• We can do marketing with each other.

Contribute Content

Do you have great content for a specific category of places, or a particular geographic region? PublicEarth would like to work with you. Here’s what you get:

• Become part of a comprehensive wiki of great things to do and places to go, organized by location.
• We expose your company/organization brand to a new audience with a real interest in what you do
• We drive traffic back to your websites as people who discover your places click to learn more.
• Participate in the Web 2.0 phenomenon “crowd-sourcing” which allows thousands of people to help maintain and update your information on PublicEarth.
• Use the data collected/updated via PublicEarth in whatever ways you like.
• Bad data and bogus place information is readily weeded out by the community, leaving good data to surface.

How do we help people find your content:

• We ‘surface’ your content to interested users via our unique map-centric user interface
• We standardize the display of places, and make it easier to search.
• We connect your data (algorithmically) to other places that help your data be found by interested consumers.
• As more people use the data, PublicEarth can improve recommendations, which (Netflix-style) put places in front of users who are likely to appreciate that information. This is more powerful than advertising, and is automatic.
• The only bias we apply to presentation of place information is its completeness and currency – when all other things are equal, richer data is preferred to sparse data; recently updated is preferred to older.
• We have a variety of ways for people to share interesting points that they find, including via e-mail and Facebook.

You can monitor and benefit from edits to your content after it’s in the PublicEarth database:

• We provide APIs that allow you to connect to the PublicEarth data.
• You can track any changes made to places you want to follow, using RSS feeds.
• We will provide widgets to present this map-based data on your own websites;
• Because we’re a wiki, if someone makes changes you disagree with, you can undo changes and restore older versions of the data. Our tools let us identify malcontents that might introduce bad data or spam into the pages. Bad data is readily cleared out and perpetrators are banned.

Widgets

Do you want a widget on your site? We have two widgets, so far -- “What’s Nearby” and “My Collection”. But we have several ideas for more, so stay tuned!

What's Nearby -- This widget is designed for partners that have their own geographic content. If you agree to provide content for our site, we can give you a widget that displays one of your places, and also “What’s Nearby”. The “What’s Nearby” will be other PublicEarth places. We will pick nearby places that are relevant to your content e.g. attractions near a place to stay. When the nearby points are selected, the description and a link to PublicEarth will be displayed. We also offer a custom “What’s Nearby” widget which allows our partners to pick any of our 450+ categories to display alongside your content.

My Collection (coming in December!) –- This widget allows you to highlight your collections on your own website or blog. When people click on any of the places, they see the PublicEarth description. To get the My Collection Widget, first you need to create a PublicEarth Collection from of any of our places. To create a Collection, you must be a registered user and logged-in. After you have created a collection, click the ‘create widget’ button, give it a name, pick a size, and you'll get a code snippet to embed in your blog or website. It’s easy to do, so just login and create a Collection widget today!

Submit Your Content

Want your content loaded into our site? Follow these simple steps to quickly get your content displayed in PublicEarth:

• Put your content in a file that you can send to us
• Sign our content agreement
• Send us a logo, name &/or website so we can give you credit for your content

How do I send you my content? We prefer that content is in a file that is either CSV or XLS format. If this is not possible, please let us know as we’ve worked with several other file formats. Next, please ensure that you have included as much data in as many fields as possible. Some of the important data fields that you should highlight include descriptions of the places, links back to the places on your site, coordinates of the places, and photos of the places (if available). We know that the places with richer detail get more clicks!

If your file is < 5 MB, you can e-mail the file to us at partners (at) publicearth dot com. Be sure to include your contact information for confirmation that we’ve received your file, and for follow-up.

Do I need to sign a content agreement? Why? We have a simple content agreement that protects you and protects PublicEarth. The content agreement outlines how we will use your content. It also provides instructions for what to do if you decide you’d like to remove your content from our site. If you would like to receive a Content Agreement that you can sign, please send an e-mail to partners (at) publicearth dot com.

What kind of logo, name or link? For all of the content that is entered into PublicEarth, we let people know who provided the data. We call this “attribution”. If you want a logo, please provide us a png, gif, or jpg file that is 48 pixels high maximum and no wider than 160 pixels. Please optimize your logo or wordmark, whether horizontally or vertically oriented, to be legible at this size. Attribution can also include a top-level link to your homepage or a deep-level link to a specific page that gives more information about a particular place. Or if you just want us to use your PublicEarth username, we can do that too.

When will my places appear within PublicEarth? If you have provided your file in either CSV or XLS format, you should see your places appear on our site within a few days. But there are a couple of caveats. We currently have 4.7 million points, and we’re growing quickly. With the billions of places around the world, we know that the only way to grow the site is to have people enter the places they know about. In some cases, however, we may already have a particular place (or places) that you submit. As soon as you send in your content file, we will run through a “duplicate checking” process where we check to see if we already have the same points loaded.

Co-marketing Efforts

How can I work with you besides sharing my content? We love working with our partners to help spread the word about PublicEarth. Several methods have worked to communicate to a broad set of people with common interests, including doing events together, co-writing articles, or highlighting collections of content in other blogs, websites, and e-newsletters. Do you have other ideas of how we could work together? Let us know!

Want to do an event together? We are interested in learning about and possibly attending different community events with partners. We’ve attended a variety of events including The Rally 2009 and the Americans for the Arts annual conference. If you’d like us to consider doing an event together, please email us with the details at partners (at) publicearth dot com.

Want to write an article about us? We welcome any articles about us! We’ve been featured in a variety of publications, such as Public Art Review. If you’d like to contact us with an article idea, please email us the details at partners (at) publicearth dot com.

Want to highlight a collection of content in your blog, or in the PublicEarth blog? If you’ve provided us with your content, then we’d like to thank you by highlighting your content in a number of different ways. We have a great community site and e-newsletters that talk about our great partners, their content, and events we’ve attended together. We encourage you to do the same on your blog, your website, or in your e-newsletter. If you’re interested in making sure your content gets pointed out to all the PublicEarth users, send us an email with the details to partners (at) publicearth dot com.