In an earlier post, I linked to Dethroner.com’s review of 9 beer-mapping sites. I think some of them are pretty neat, but there’s at least one major problem… none of them have very good coverage of my current home, Providence, RI. Since I know there are plenty of beer-loving geeks in this city, I’d like to get the ball rolling on a Providence Beer Map.

I was originally tempted to roll-my-own solution, but fortunately I came across Platial first. It took 2 minutes to set up and WordPress has built-in support for loading the MapKit into the sidebar of this blog. Most importantly, anyone can add locations as they see fit, as well as tag, rate and comment spots. It looks like a great and easy way to start building our database. Awesome.

That said, Platial is a generic tool, so I can easily imagine outgrowing it rather quickly as we start using it to find hangouts. Fortunately, if that does happen, and I decide to roll-my-own more focused app, scraping out the spots we’ve put into Platial will be pretty easy, so entering spots now isn’t going to lock us in or anything bad like that. Sweet.

I’ll be adding to this map at a leisurely pace, and I encourage other Providentialites(?) to pitch in their favorite gin joints, etc. If you’re not local, I encourage you to start your own Platial map and post the link in the comments.