Pegasus News - Dallas/Fort Worth

On Tuesday, over on The Frontburner, Adam McGill sang the praises of a web service called Unthirsty, "a Google Maps mash-up that plots happy hour locations in any given city."

He lamented that Dallas was underrepresented, as the site is one of those services that depends solely on user submissions. He egged his Frontburnervians into posting happy hours on the site to the point that by days end there were nearly thirty. 

Hurrah for the social media revolution.

Except for one thing. Many of the posts were by bar owners not advertising any specific special -- they just wanted a dot on the map. One of the "bars" was the D Magazine offices. And of the ones that had info, more than a third were dead wrong. Happy hours listed at times when the bars were closed. And inaccurate happy hour info too.

How do I know all that? Because we're sitting on the most complete database of DFW happy hours ever assembled, nearly 800 in all. Is it complete? No. But it's damn close. Is it perfect? No. But it's far more accurate than anything else out there. And when our users tell us what's wrong, we'll verify and fix and maintain every day.

"Sure, Mike," you say. "You've been prattling on about this sort of thing for ages. Where's the proof?"

It's here.

A comprehensive map of DFW drink specials. We had the data already, but not the interface. We were planning to launch it along with the rest of Pegasus News, but about ten minutes after reading Adam's post we made the decision to put it out. Save for the data collection, which we had in the can, the whole thing took us about 36 hours to launch. We would have had it up yesterday, but it happened to coincide with a move of our servers, and we didn't want to configure it twice

Here's the same zoom for us:

.

...and Unthirsty (cropping intentional):

Friends, I can't stress this enough. We are not screwing around here. There are lots of new tools and technology that enable the sharing of all kinds of useful information on a local level. But if you try to use them in a bottom-down rigid traditional media kinda way, they'll  never do what people want them to do. And if you do them in a bottom-up hippified "let the people provide the information" way, you're going to wind up with a mostly-empty room punctuated by cobwebs of bad data.

I'm not picking on Unthirsty. They built a cool app and made it available in cities everywhere. I can't help you one bit if you want a drink special in Portland. But, if you're looking for drink specials here, in DFW, we got your back. 

Now let's go have a drink, eh? And when you find missing specials, or the odd mistake, please let us know.