Am I Missing Something?

[kevin_standlee]

In this message on the Anticipation LJ, there is a question raised about the street address of the convention centre where Anticipation will be held, the Palais des Congrès. It is of course a trivially easy thing to find out without much effort, so I answered the question. The person seems to think that it's a very strange thing to not put on the convention's web site. I checked several past convention's sites, and none of them have given their facilities' street addresses -- they've provided links to those facilities own web sites, where you can usually find directions.

As I said there, if the street address was such a crucially important piece of information that it was vital that every member needed to know and couldn't find any other reasonable way, I would expect that someone would have said something about it years ago. Indeed, I would think that putting information like that on your own event's web site is an excessive level of detail -- the kind of stuff that makes people's eyes glaze over. It would be different if the convention site were secret, hidden, or somehow difficult to find, but most convention centers are very prominent places that aren't particularly hidden.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

If I travel to a convention far away, I often need to use a cab or public transit for the last leg. For a cab, "the convention center" works fine in most cities (and Worldcon can't afford the others, mostly :-)). But it's completely useless for looking up on a map. Also, if I'm trying to get an idea of geography and where I am (in advance), I need to find it on a map. If it's obvious on the convention center's own site, and the con links to that obviously, that seems pretty satisfactory.

I wonder if expecting to find it is some kind of holdover from conventions in hotels?

Or maybe it's just people being careful to prepare well for the long trip to the scary foreign city; I certainly did that before my trip to Montreal a couple years ago.

We do have the address, and directions, to the Minicon hotel on the Minicon 44 web page (which I had nothing to do with, so what's there is an independent bit of info from what I think), even though we're close to, or past, the point where a majority of Minicons have been in this hotel.

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

Nearly every anime con has directions to the Convention Center or Hotel and many include a street address for the facility. Many people do drive to cons, so we consider the street address an important piece of information

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Nearly every anime con has directions to the Convention Center or Hotel and many include a street address for the facility.

Otakon has the former, but not the latter. It fails the "street address" test, but -- like I would expect -- it links to the Baltimore Convention Center's web site.

In my experience, the street address of a convention center isn't useful if I actually want to attend anything at that venue, especially if I'm driving. If I'm driving, I want to know where I can park. If you drive to the San Jose Convention Center's (corrected) street address, you'll find a forecourt where you can drop people off, but no place to park.

I guess I'm just blind to something here. Isn't a link to a facility's web site (which will generally have better directions than what the convention could write) better than cluttering up your own web site with redundant information?

And maybe I just take the tech too much for granted. I drove to Denvention, but aside from knowing where it was relative to the hotel, the only address I wanted was that of the Crowne Plaza hotel (which I got from the hotel web site as I recall) and which I fed into Microsoft MapPoint as part of my general driving directions for the entire trip.

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

http://www.animeusa.org/locationhotel/ has the street address and Directions. We are in a hotel. People frequently don't go to the convention center's website. They want that information on one page on the convention's website.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Yes, and that's a convention at a hotel, not a major metropolitan landmark. The specific question was "what's the convention center's street address."

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

Makes sense. As someone who thinks more in Hotel conventions than Convention center cons, this makes more sense. On Anime Expo's website, they have the convention's Center address on the Parking and directions pages.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I certainly don't have gps live in my car, and if I did I wouldn't trust it for complex downtown areas (where it's hard to correct if you go wrong due to frequent maze of one-way streets plus heavy traffic).

And I generally expect conventions to produce much better directions than the facilities have; because the con starts with what the facility has, and fixes the obvious flaws.

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

For using google maps or yahoo maps a street address is often important. "Convention Center" doesn't work in all cities as a search location, even in cities where there's only one.

Convention centers often don't realize this themselves and I've had to use their direction maps to find the intersection they're near so to use as a search parameter.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

My entire point here is that finding the convention location in Montreal, with the information on or accessible within a click or two of the site, is trivially simple. Or at least it seems that way to me. And I've never been there. I will be flying up there for a short visit in April, courtesy of Northwest Airlines frequent flyer miles I want to use before Delta decides to find a way to erase them, but I've not been there before.

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

If you comment was specific to Montreal, then the answer is even more simple. Many many people want life handed to them on a silver platter and get pissed off when that doesn't happen. So on that count, you're not missing anything except that belief for yourself.

:)

[edgreen86.livejournal.com]

Fans love details. Fans like to have tons and tons of details. They like to lay details all over their beds and roll naked among them. They want to fondle them and hold them.

What Fans don't do well is analyze the details and come to conclusions with them. They sometimes can't recognize that merely having data isn't nearly as good as *using* the data.

The Worldcon is being held at the "X" Convention Center. In the City of "Y".

I can bet that almost any Con website will give you tons of data on how to get there, where to eat, size, maps and possibly the web access points. All those wonderful little details!

Well and good, but really, is it *that* great a tasking to insert a street address on the website? Glad to have a link to "X" Convention Center, but why push me through to another website when all I need is a quick info dump?

Comes close to being lazy, and not thinking things through. It also sounds like another great fannish tradition "But, we've always done it that way"!

[nojay.livejournal.com]

What data could be punched into a GPS navigation system to direct someone driving through an unfamiliar city's streets to the entrance of the convention centre? The units I'm familiar with tend to use a street number/name and (in the UK) a postcode. I don't think that "the convention centre" is an optional field/button on many dashboard nav unit displays.

Heck, I'd probably put latitide and longtitude numbers on the website (my pocket GPS doesn't have mappings for Canada's towns and cities but it does do long and lat).

[howeird]

I would not be able to justify leaving off the address of the venue. We're talking two short lines of text which takes maybe 20 seconds to add to the site. It also serves to keep the fan at the con site, rather than forcing a click-through to an external site.

It helps art show partcipants and dealers to have the street address to ship items to the site. As others have mentioned, it helps locate the site on a map for planning purposes.

And for strictly archival purposes, 20 years from now when the city have imploded the convention center and moved it to the 'burbs, it would be nice for WSFS to have an easy to find record of the historic location. ;-)

IMHO just the address of the site doesn't qualify as clutter. A map of the city, showing the site, and an exploded view of the rooms in the convention center - now that would be clutter. It still belongs on the con site, just not on the home page.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

It helps art show partcipants and dealers to have the street address to ship items to the site.

Except that, most of the time, the "street address" isn't the shipping address. I know it wasn't for ConJose, nor was it in Denver, and as the Palais' contact us page explains, it isn't the case in Montreal either.

So posting the notional street address (which may not be the place where people will actually enter the site in practice) will undoubtedly lead to people getting even more confused and complaining that the information we posted wasn't what they wanted. And if you included the shipping address, you'll have people driving up to the loading dock and getting confused as well. (Heck, I thought I knew where I was going in Denver when I went to the loading dock to deliver the Mimeograph, and it turns out that I'd gone to the wrong dock -- there was more than one of them!) This matter of "address" means different things to different people and has no one single correct answer. Diverting people toward a page of its own that has all of the variations is a better solution.

I continue to think that, if only one person has asked for this information in ten years, it's not especially vital. Most of the people commenting here have only done so because it has been pointed out to the them that the specific bit of information in question isn't there, and I doubt many of them would have had any problem finding it on their own. Just how much hand-holding must we do of our members?

And for strictly archival purposes, 20 years from now when the city have imploded the convention center and moved it to the 'burbs, it would be nice for WSFS to have an easy to find record of the historic location. ;-)

I'm on the committee that keeps track of past Worldcon information, and I don't recall anyone every making an issue of what the specific address of a Worldcon site was. Certainly it's not something we store; we just include the name of the major facilities used. And a number of those sites have indeed vanished, such as the site of the 1961 Worldcon in Seattle, which is now underneath light rail construction.