Travel Marketing in the Age of Web 2.0 & Beyond

Here's a new take on a well known saying I like....

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a consultant.

Scott Adams, Dogbert; Dilbert cartoons
US cartoonist (1957 - )

Tags: consulting

I agree with Nielsen

Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill? that too many websites are violating this principle, especially DMO sites that often try to leverage the huge piles of data their organizations have at their disposal. To put too much of it on your site and in the wrong place can be a killer, so less is often more The only beef I have with his post is that I think it is rather too long itself.....!

 

This is a welcome development

Travelocity launches new trip planning tool and one that goes in the right direction, away from the now pretty much standard template of asking people where they want to fly and when and take it from there.

Multi-destination and component research and planning is a logical next step to dynamic packaging that deserves the term.
To make the user experience a better one the tight integration of information sources and combination of mashups has to happen. This is certainly a welcome effort.

On Web 3.0

is a comment on Read/Write Web about the discussion that has sprouted up around the version game on the web and the often misunderstood meaning of terms like 1.0 /  2.0 and now 3.0

I tend to agree with what is said, especially with the explanation by Nova Spivack. I've said this before, numbers don't really matter, it's what is happening on the web and the fascinating new developments, with sites like Twine, that is important.

 

Radar Networks' Twine: Semantic Web meets information overload

Here's a more detailed description of what Twine is about and it seems to me an improvement over what we've seen so far in social networking tools.

Nova Spivack thinks it's high time we make computers smart enough to manage the ocean of scattered information our digital lives create.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Friday, Spivack will officially take Radar Networks, the start-up he co-founded, out of stealth mode and show off Twine, a Web service for managing information, using your social network and the Semantic Web.

With Twine, people collect different pieces of information in a single place and let other people add to that collection. People can e-mail items into Twine, bookmark Web pages or upload documents. To add tags, people fill in a form.

The software is smart enough to create tags itself after mining through the content, which can be text, audio or video. It also taps into the collective knowledge of Wikipedia to categorize information.

Radar Networks' Twine service for managing Web info and collaborating.

Under the covers, Radar Network's server is using natural language processing and Semantic Web technology to get a better idea of the meaning of a person's collected information.

"This is the user experience side of the Semantic Web," said Spivack. "Our motto is 'people are lazy.' Who wants to spend their time being a librarian?...That's what we made computers for."

The idea behind the Semantic Web is that Web content has embedded data that allows applications to "talk" to each other. With that self-describing information, summed up in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format, software agents can act on information, making life easier for Web users.

Spivack said that the Twine "knowledge networking" service really shines when used for collaboration. People can share information on a certain subject and get notifications when someone in their social network posts something new. The more information Twine gathers, the better it gets at recommendations and understanding a user's preferences.

Radar Networks' plan is to offer a free service that is advertising-supported and to introduce a line of premium services, which would be more geared toward business users.

Also in store are a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that will let outside developers write applications on its platform. Spivack said that Radar Networks intends to follow the same strategy that Salesforce.com has in building its online development platform AppExchange, which provides a foundation for building third-party applications.

The Radar Networks platform is based on Web standards RDF and OWL (Web Ontology Language), which means that information can be transported into another service, says Spivack.

Tags: semanticweb, web 3.0, networking, collaboration

Twine.com

is the name of the just launched site by Radar Networks  at Web2.0 Summit and it claims to be a Revolutionary Semantic Web Application. Having followed the company and their CEO Nova Spivack for some time, I believe this to be an exciting new development in what's coming next on the web - also called web 3.0 by some, a new term that will most likely be as controversial and misunderstood as web 2.0 is by many today.



I can't imagine that this kind of technology will not have an impact on travel, at least as significant as the web 2.0 tools are having at present. In addition the semantic web promises to affect and even transform collaboration even more than web 2.0 has done.

Information R/evolution

here is a fascinating video about what's happening all around us with information and how  it is used, absorbed, changed, improved, collected, spread and on and on.....

It's a great take on the book Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger.

Tags: informationmiscellaneous

Is viral marketing the same as word of mouth?

is the question posed on Seth's Blog: and as always, he makes very valid point by claiming that it is not.

His comments make it very clear what the differences are between mere word of mouth and an ideavirus.

It also becomes clear, why creating one is such a difficult task and why marketer intervention doesn't really make it happen, on the contrary. Good read.

 

The shift to interactive marketing continues

according to this latest study by

Forrester: Interactive Marketing Spend to Surpass $61B in Five Years. This is a considerable amount and what is even more significant is that the leading category by a wide margin is travel & hospitality with $ 8.7 billion spent in 2007.

This tells me that any organization in our industry not focusing as a priority on interactive marketing to generate business is missing a great opportunity for effective and highly measurable marketing.

Enemybook and Snubster anyone?

Here comes the antidote to all those friends requests that you might not really want to accept sometimes, New Facebook Apps That Explore Dark Side of Relationships let you start an enemy list. How about that for making a statement of being less than in a social mood sometimes and keep certain people at arms length....!

And the founder of Enemybook already was interviewed on NPR's Day to Day program. Try getting that exposure with your plain vanilla app!