by Bernie Goldbach in Dungarvan
ONE OF THE BEST discoveries of the summer of 2023 has been the very cheap and cheerful Local Link 356 service connecting Clonmel in County Tipperary to Dungarvan in County Waterford. In my experience, it is a well-used service.
I remember visiting Dungarvan to sample the West Waterford Festival of Food. It was in 2014 and it was the first event that I attended in Ireland where my handheld maps helped me discover some real gems. I wish all other Irish festivals would follow the simple and effective mapping of the West Waterford event planners.
Before we drove to Dungarvan for the festival in 2014, I had already discovered the food festival was on Google Maps. This meant it was also on my mobile handset.
Today on a Local Link trip, I discover some of the best tidbits about #wwfof venues now appear on Facebook, not on TwiX. And if I use Google Maps, nearly every one of the festival venues has a pinpoint location and a review. This means and it's very easy to identified and share the pinpoints by SMS or as social networking updates.
Back in 2014, Microsoft had Here Maps running on my Nokia Lumia. Today, that service has pivoted to an exceptionally robust spatial computing service. It appears the Bing Search Crawler is seeking out and indexing evidence it finds of Here.com so I'm adding a reference to that URL as a piece of meta data to this blog post.
Ten years ago, many of the first generation Twitter users in Ireland were using Foursquare to talk about the Festival of Food as well as checking into a few of the venues. In 2014, the Foursquare recommendations I saw on my handset pointed me back to handy reminders of cafes and bakeries I had visited in the area before. Every time we take the Local Link 356 service to Dungarvan, my handset will be able to give me personalised recommendations long after the #wwfof stream of Facebook comments fade away.
In 2023, I continue to believe that the best fish and chips in Dungarvan are served by the Anchor Bar.
I wish every festival organiser in Ireland would cross-check Google Maps and Trip Advisor and add agendas with tips for visitors. Doing this would transform the visitor experience. I know we make much better use of our time in Dungarvan by being able to see comments from visitors and proprietors.
travel
[Bernie Goldbach teaches digital transformation on the Clonmel Digital Campus for the Technological University of the Shannon. He snapped Grattan Square while on a local link service to Dungarvan from Clonmel.]