Starbucks Delocator
In a recent post on boingboing.net they talked about delocator.net, or the Starbucks Delocator. What I thought was rather intrigiuing about this story is the somewhat rare convergance of several seemingly unrelated topics; coffee (and where to get good coffee), the intellectual property dispute and just how far those rights go, and search engine optimization.
So the short story of the Starbucks Delocator is this. Man (or the San Francisco Art Institute) creates website ( and art exhibit) whose sole purpose is to locate independent coffee houses (or de-locate starbucks as it were). But for fear of getting sued into oblivion (Edit: on the part of the exhibit hall/Edit ), they don’t use starbucks in the site name. But whats the point if you can’t find it in google?? So woman (Carrie McLaren) starts grass-roots linking campaign to get people to link to it by its real name: Starbucks Delocator to address that situation.
Who knows if the campaign will work (a cool idea either way), but a good way to find a good independent coffee house to support whether at home or exploring a new city.
So as Cory said, “Now, get your link on!” Starbucks Delocator
April 8th, 2005 at 3:19 pm
thanks for posting our site info (delocator.net). the story is almost accurate, in the 11th hour of preparing to open the exhibit portion of the project, the exhibition space would not allow us to use “starbucks” in the title in fear of drawing a lawsuit.
we are very suprised that this story has travelled as far as it has. remember too, this project aims beyond starbucks. our hope is that people use the toolkit on the site to delocate other transnational corps.
thanks again,
fs
April 9th, 2005 at 3:46 am
Thanks for posting this site. Its great to see my fav coffee spots come up right away.
April 10th, 2005 at 12:16 am
Ah, well then, thanks for the correction on that (I’ll fix the post with those details). Best of luck with the art exhibit, and I’ll have to look into the toolkit side of things when I get some time.
–Kevin