Tea Map references

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John_B
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Tue Jan 08, 2019 8:57 pm

This subject keeps coming up, that there is no central reference for tea shops, that I'm aware of.

I mentioned a few such references in a blog post about finding tea shops (the Reddit sub version, Tea Chat's, Steepster's), but none of those are remotely well populated or up to date. The links to them are in the post though, for what it's worth:

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.co ... r-you.html

Some guy made his own tea map, mentioned in a Steepster forum discussion, and the Google Maps format would work (or even his version), but it's still just some guy's version that anyone can make changes to:

https://steepster.com/discuss/25407-wor ... ap-project

You might wonder, where am I going with this? I'm not sure I would say that such a good central reference should exist, but it's odd to me that it doesn't. Tea Forum could start its own but I'm not sure how it would be any different than those other four.

Starting a link about tea shops in Vietnam reminded me of this. I ran across a thread about shop or source references in Thailand here while looking around just now. I guess that's how it has to be related to turning up good leads; someone would have to scan a dozen related sites and groups through searches.
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pedant
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Mon Sep 30, 2019 12:17 am

John_B wrote:
Tue Jan 08, 2019 8:57 pm
You might wonder, where am I going with this? I'm not sure I would say that such a good central reference should exist, but it's odd to me that it doesn't. Tea Forum could start its own but I'm not sure how it would be any different than those other four.
hey john,

i'm open to doing some kind of TF tea map, but i'd have to think of a way to improve on existing options (like that steepster user's gmap, which is actually kind of nice).

lmk if you wanna bounce ideas around sometime.

Edit: sorry I didn't see this earlier. For future reference, posting in the feedback area is probably better so we dont miss suggestions: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=27
John_B
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Mon Sep 30, 2019 11:39 pm

It seems the only way this would really work is if someone developed a much more open version of one, not a map tied to Tea Forum, or Steepster, or to a FB group or whatever else. Then the admin function would be problematic; how would that be set up, and why would someone want to do it in the first place?

Someone might want to do it as a commercial venture, but that's problematic too. It leads directly back to narrowing inputs and control. All of these reasons seem to combine to result in there being at least 4 versions of tea maps out there now (Steepster's, Tea Chat's, Reddit's, and that other I mentioned), all of them poorly populated and completely out of date.

The founder of the Gong Fu Cha Facebook group kicked around the idea of starting one, and probably bumped into these same concerns, and never did. I don't have any solution for all this. Eventually there will be a good reason to start a good version but at the rate things go now that could be awhile, and I can't foresee how it would work.
John_B
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Mon Sep 30, 2019 11:47 pm

I checked that relatively open version I had mentioned in a Steepster link; it's interesting seeing how it worked out:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid= ... 87%2C0&z=2

That map had 205 views so far, originally posted there a year ago. There are about 20 shops in the US listed, 20 in Europe, and 5 in Asia, none in Africa, South America, or Australia. I've been to that many shops myself, spanning more countries but focused more in Asia.

The set-up looks reasonable and promising, it just didn't get far.
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Elise
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Wed Oct 30, 2019 6:31 am

There is a map with the teas from the online shop, not exactly what was asked for but still...:
https://zhaozhoutea.com/tea-map/
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