23 Musings

Amazed to hear today about Reuters new deal with the International Herald Tribune. Reuters have agreed to allow the IHT to carry their content in return for a share of the advertising revenue generated. This is a major change in their business model (a change for the better as far as I am concerned).

News wires traditionally charge a subscription fee for content sites to carry their story and distribute it. This is a great step towards becoming a 21st century company for Reuters. They have the potential to make much more money from advertising than from subscriptions.

Yes, subscriptions are a safe flow of revenue, but by being mature and allowing people to use their content for no upfront charge they actually stand to make far more money.

Well done Reuters for wising up to the web! Next step, make it truly free (although this is a good first step)! And well done to the web for continuing to shake old media at it's core and forcing them to grow up to keep up!

I love Netvibes. It's my starting point, feed reader and information consumption tool of choice. They've just announced a new version called Ginger which is coming very soon.

New features include...

Easier access to content:

New social and sharing features (including being able to import friends lists from social networks):

Activity notification (so you know what your friends like and do, a kind of news feed for Netvibes):
There's also going to be an easier way to create Universes and load up social presence widgets, content for your friends etc. It's really heading towards giving you similar functionality to your Facebook homepage but without being tied in and being more open in that you can add any email, messaging or other tool you like.

Sounds great! Looking forward to trying it soon!

Since Yahoo bought Flickr it's all been relatively quiet. Yahoo have made use of it on a couple of occasions, integrating Flickr images into some of their services but other than that nothing major has happened to change the service significantly. It does what it says on the tin and is my photo upload site of choice still.

Some announcements (courtesy of Techcrunch) were made last night which could reveal a new approach, or at least a new string to the Flickr/Yahoo bow.

They are adding new functionality to their geotagging by placing the tags onto maps making it much easier to search your way around the world. This is really just a catch up to Zooomr. The really interesting piece of functionality and the one which has the most relevance to the online travel world is the coming introduction of 'places' pages on Flickr.

'Places' will be pages which pull together the most interesting photos about a destination and tag associated with it. So you will be able to view pages on for example London/buildings. You'll be able to explore over 70,000 places through photos, tags and featured photographers. Now, this is sounding like a very good source of destination content for the travel industry!

Here's an example screenshot (courtesy Techcrunch)


The interesting thing will be to see if these new pages are monetised when they launch in the coming weeks. I'm sure Yahoo will place sponsored links on the pages but will they go one step further and place calls to action to book hotels, flights or trips to these destinations?

I'd say it's a perfect opportunity for Yahoo. Yahoo Travel is a pretty good site now with their review, booking and destination information. Roll all of this into a location led service filled with great imagery and content and you could have a pretty interesting concept.

Of course the other opportunity for travel companies is what kind of access you will be able to get to these new pages through the Flickr API. Thomson and others already pull photos from Flickr, will you be able to pull content by place now? Much more useful, and less likely to be irrelevant to your users!

Here are the details of the forthcoming changes (courtesy Techcrunch via Scribd).

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the use of tagging is growing fast among US web users. The December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.

Tagging has always had this perception that it's a step towards a semantic (read more intelligent) way to traverse the web, but in reality it is proving a common sense approach to cutting and dicing information to make it easier to manage/find. Although it does have it's detractors who say tagging is too simple, I'm of the opinion that it's an incredibly useful tool when used correctly. Roll on the day when all content management systems come with a built in folksonomy function!

Yahoo have teamed up with Reuters to begin a push into news related user generated content. They'll be inviting the public to submit eyewitness photos and videos of news events.

Yahoo will allow users to submit related photo's on their site, they will go through some kind of vetting process one would assume and then end up published on Yahoo meta-tagged as related to a particular story. The images wil be run as part of topical packages on the site, I guess meaning that as big news stories break Yahoo will build the content around those stories.

The You Witness system will be expanded to take content for sports, entertainment etc in the future, but news will be the initial push. The content will be shared with Reuters after a few months of testing on Yahoo only.

Yahoo and Reuters are working on a way to compensate contributors when their media is used in a commercial manner, which should ensure a good level of submission as budding photographers and journalists everywhere try to get in on the act.

Yahoo's had a few good ideas lately, making use of their purchases such as Flickr in this case in some innovative ways is always good for their PR factor.

Deciding what to put on your site homepage can be a real dilemma. It's like your websites shop front, it has a huge job to do but little space and depth to achieve everything it needs to. It's particularly difficult for websites with loads of content or a wide range of products to sell. The prioritisation of space and what you display can be really difficult to decide upon.

The first hurdle is recognising what a homepage needs to do. As you would expect it's the first page of a website that the majority of your users are going to see, a lot of those visitors won't know who you are or what you do and therefore needs to answer some basic questions for them:

• What is this? - Whenever I visit a website I like to be able to gauge what it's about just by glancing over it
• What do they offer to me? - Like the first question I want to be able to work out what they have to offer me or what it is I can do on their website.
• Why should I be here? - As there are generally other sites with the same offerings, why should I invest my time and effort navigating yours.

Answering those questions to a new visitor is key. Ask any usability company and they will tell you that one of the first things they do when testing a new site in the labs is set users loose on the homepage and see what the initial impressions are. You'd be amazed the answers you get from this kind of research with some very high profile websites!

Of course that isn't all that your homepage needs to do. It needs to tempt the users to stick around, be impressing and give them the routes into the website to find what they are looking for. A homepage should be aspirational; by this I don't mean whimsical or covered in aspirational imagery, more that the scene it sets in the users mind should get them into the mood for browsing/reading/buying/doing whatever it is you want them to browse/read/buy/do.

Some of the things a homepage should look to contain include:

• Site identity - if you have a company logo use it, it's what anyone who's heard of you before will identify with, and if they haven't heard of you or seen it before you will want them to become familiar with it.
• Statement of intent - let them know what you do, this doesn't have to be in words it can be in pictures too.
• Entry points - ways into the main areas of the website or the places you want users to end up (navigation is a whole article of it's own!).
• Search box - if you have a site search (including a booking form) make it prominent on the homepage.
• Something that changes - if nothing ever changes on your homepage it's doubtful you'll get the repeat visitors you may require. This could be press releases, offers, tip of day or aspirational imagery etc.

There's much more you can include of course but these five things above tend to be on every homepage.

You may ask 'what of the websites who have an animated homepage with little to no content or navigation?'. Well, I consider these a kind of interstitial page, used to set the mood or reinforce brand. Not to everyones taste but they can be very effective for companies who have a strong brand to live up to. Most sites using this kind of page will have the equivalent of the traditional homepage as the next page in the user journey.

Most of all a homepage needs to show that you are a credible outfit. If you don't build trust with your users you won't operate effectively in the online world. A common mistake of highly brand driven companies is treating the web like a piece of software and instead of reinforcing their brand it kind of gets lost amongst the pixels. If you are a brand led company, remember that you wouldn't treat television in such a way so please have respect for the powerful brand building tool that the online environment has become!

We all know that the search engines use Robots to scour the web and catalogue new and exisiting pages in order to provide an index that we can traverse but whatever has happened to the personal bots that were flourishing in the late 1990's?

One of my earliest jobs in the online world was managing the data returned by a group of knowledge bots that were tasked with finding competitive intelligence for clients, these were very successful in their day and if the search query was fine tuned constantly they nearly always returned results with high relevance.

Autonomy had their personal search agent; which while masquerading as a doglike character went off to scour the web looking for relevant links and content. Hotbot (the search engine) had a service called Newsbot which scoured the news sites constantly looking for articles containing keywords you'd chosen. Both these services died a death (along with the agents I was at one time responsible for).

These days search engines are much easier to use (although I still hanker for a large text area to enter full boolean queries in a nostalgic kind of way) and it is easier to find relevant links. RSS feeds enable us to subscribe to sites of interest and news search engines allow us to set up alerts on chosen search parameters. But is this enough?

The web is huge, lets face it, the ratio of spam to good content is growing in spams favour all the time and finding everything on a very specific subject is nigh on impossible. With so many users coming online every day a lot of them really don't understand search engines or the web for that matter (and why should they, proven by all the people who type correct url's into the search box) I believe there must be a place for personal search agents once again. To really see what people are saying about your company for example, you have to visit every search engine, news sites and aggregators, blog searches, forums etc etc. A very time consuming task!

I'd use a service where I could fine tune my results, send a bot out daily to hunt for new links (using links and engine queries to get started) and only returning the new ones each day. Build all this into a really nicely developed interface (ajax if you like, imagine the sliding bars to rate results with the data then being added to the query parameters) and I reckon you'd be on to a winner. Market it in the right way, and to the right groups of people (companies needing intelligence, net newbies, information freaks like me) and I'm sure it would be a viable business model!

Is anyone doing this? I've found many services purporting to offer personalised search services, but none tick all the boxes and none offer the depth of search I'd require. Let me know if you know of anything that will fit the bill!

I was thinking today about the way portals used to bang on about 'Push' technology as the next big thing. Who remembers a service launched in about 1998 which was a 'personalised' (I use that term lightly) homepage which pushed content to it's users? I can't for the life of me remember the name of the thing, all I can remember is it didn't last long! (Although something in the back of my brain says it may have actually been something built into early Netscape browsers...)

Now with so much content available and technologies such as RSS available to us we all pull whatever content we choose and these kind of sites have become aggregators rather than a platform to push their chosen content to us.

I guess in some ways we are still pushed to, as we can't choose which articles of an RSS feed to receive in most cases.

Anyone remember the site? If you do, please post a comment!

So, the buzzword of the year seems to be UGC (no, not that cinema firm) 'user generated content'. The practice of allowing users to contribute to your website is not a new one however, in fact it's been around since the 1990's in the form of forums and reviews, but lately it's become seen as one of the key points of Web2.0 and it seems everyone is scrabbling to get on the bandwagon (at least they are in travel).

UGC add's a huge amount of value to your website in a number of ways (here's a few below):

• the content changes regularly which is key to securing repeat visitors and a good position in natural search
• it builds trust; the subject of reviews has made many travel companies very nervous but those who have bitten the bullet and allowed it have found it helped increase conversions by allowing users to read what real people thought of a hotel/destination (you only have to look at the success of Tripadvisor to see the demand for this type of content)
• it's free; all the content you receive is freely contributed generally by people who care about the topic

Of course there's also some downfalls (again, here's a sample below):

• quality; letting anyone submit content to your site means you are going to receive alot of badly written, poor grammer laden content which can lower the overall quality of your site (in my opinion you should resist the temptation to edit and leave it as is, editing users submissions is one way to lower the trust in your site)
• increased work for you; someone of course has to manage this content. While I believe yu shouldn't edit anything yu allow to be posted you do of course have to filter out the offensive or wacko type submissions you will receive
• legal; at some point something libellous will get posted (you just can't avoid it), be prepared to have to deal with it

In my opinion the opportunities presented by UGC far out weigh the pitfalls!

In the travel sector there are many opportunities to acquire and use UGC. I've detailed some of the opportunities below and split them into pre-booking, post-departure (while they're away) and on return (note; this isn't an exhaustive list, just a few ideas of how I would do it).

Pre-booking:

• not so much content but at this point I would gather info from the user as to what hotels they are viewing etc and store this to be able to display the most viewed or popular
• also worth finding out what kind of holiday they are looking for (eg. family, honeymoon, couples) and cross referencing this with the hotels they book to help you classify your content better
  

Post-departure:

• there's an opportunity to cash in on the more tech savvy holiday makers at this point. There are many services that can be built allowing users to SMS or email photo's from their mobile phones onto your website while they are abroad. Imagine allowing everybody who books on your site to set up their own photo blog for when they are away
• you could also get reviews from the more tech savvy customers, both online or by text again (the customers blog could include text entries as well as photo)
  

On return:

• reviews; get your customers to tell you what they thought of the flights, hotels, resorts, activities, staff etc. This becomes a hugely valuable source of info for prospective customers
• tagging; get your customers to classify the hotel/holiday for you. If you have a decent content management system you should be able to associate this data with the hotel and allow other users to use this data in their hunt for a holiday
• photo's; get their holiday photo's on to their blog that you gave them. Make it clear that you may use the photo's and then you can take your pick from the best
• video; similar to photo, video could be uploaded to the site for other users to view
  

So there are quite a few ideas for ways to acquire content from your users in the travel sector. There are many more touch points than these where you can make use of their interactions with your website as well but I'll leave you to uncover them. all these touch points also become great opportunities to collect customer data for marketing purposes as well, so make sure you have a decent CRM system so you can make full use of it!

The key to all of this is having a decent CMS and infrastructure which links all the data you glean from users with your main content repository. There is absolutely no point in collecting content from users unless others users are going to be able to find and make use of it!

Google Earth seems to be the next bandwagon that travel companies are grabbing hold of to try and make themselves look forward thinking and switched on.

The first (as far as I know) to do this was Thomson. Thomson have shown themselves to have a real innovative approach to the online sector and they've embraced Earth, blogging, podcasting etc before most others and should be applauded for that! I'm sure this is helped by having a head of new media (GD) who genuinely appears passionate and open to new ideas. Oh to have someone like that here :)

Anyway, I believe the Adventure Company were next to join the Earth bandwagon.

Now British Airways have not only put their destination airports and flight prices on it but they've also listed all the hotels they offer as well. The really nice angle to BA's use of Google Earth is the way they've tied it in with their offline marketing. They're using satellite images from Earth in their TV adverts and have reproduced the cloud prices from that advert on Earth as well. Hats off to a very clever marketing team!

Now while this is all great and is helping to move the travel industry forward online, my question is 'what about the user'? Where's the value to a user who's browsing the Thomson or BA website? They have to download Earth if they don't already have it, then load the layer, then get taken off the website into another application only to be sent back to the website again to read full details of an offer or to book. Not too much of a problem I'll admit, but it is making the user experience disjointed.

I believe that all these companies have missed a trick! While Earth is a great gimmick and something they should be doing, they should have focused on integrating Google Maps into their website first. Once all their product was on Maps they could easily have created an Earth layer from the data. Integrating Google Maps into a travel website with all their products displayed and linked to geographically is infinitely more useful to the average user. They remain in their web browser, remain in the website, can access associated content quickly and easily and if well implemented can display only available product on the maps adding far more value than Earth can right now.