Slicing the fruitcake of atomic content

Atomic content is the buzzword for distilling travel information into its smallest possible units, the atomlike single points of interest (POIs) that stud the pages of a guidebook, in the same way that nuts stud the innards of a rich, rummy fruitcake. And the premise certainly sounds seductive: once these nuts are liberated from dough tying them together, so the theory goes, then they can be repackaged and recombined into all sorts of new, sexy pastries and confections. Baklava! Pistachio ice cream! Nutty monetized eyeballs! The sky is the limit!

And from a purely technological point of view, atomic content does make huge amounts of sense. Tag POIs with geographical coordinates and store them in a database, and all sorts of neat things that you can’t do with a printed guidebook suddenly become easy: you can create a dynamic map that can pan and zoom, you can serve them up in a car navigator, you can get a list of all restaurants within 100 meters of a point. Whee!

Yet the fallout of decomposing a fruitcake into its constituent parts is insidious and dangerous.

People rarely count the number of nuts in a slice of fruitcake, but if the price is the same, any shopper will take the 1 kg bag of nuts over the 500g bag of nuts.

Atomic content emphasizes quantity over quality. A guidebook lists only the best 10 restaurants for a town, not all 500, but any feed consumer will prefer the feed of 500 POIs to a feed of just ten. This pervesely incentivizes lowering the bar and keeping around old and even actively harmful information simply to inflate the POI count.

The only perceptible difference between the various brands of peanuts at your local supermarket is price.

Atomic content is commoditized. There are a handful of sources out there for local POI information, all offering the same basic bits and bobs of information: name, address, coordinates, perhaps a telephone number, web address or opening hours. The only differentiating factors are quantity (see previous point) and, as distant second and third, accurary and recentness, resulting in a race to the bottom that only the largest can win. The quality of the review doesn’t really figure as far as Google is concerned, which means that user-written reviews, even if they’re crap or spam, can easily trump professionally authored reviews.

If I pick an almond from a bag of mixed nuts and eat it, there is nothing stopping me from eating a macadamia or cashew next.

Atomic content is not sticky. If I Google “how do I get from Narita airport to central Tokyo“, Google will return 140,000 pages all advising me to take the train, not a taxi. Having gleaned that atom of information off the page — and the way the Internet works, it’s the page most whole-heartedly devoted to answering that question and only that question that will bubble to the top — I have no incentive whatsoever to stay on the page, and odds are extremely high that the next question I ask, whatever it may be, will take me somewhere else entirely.

It’s the dough that makes or breaks the cake.

Ever heard somebody praise the quality of the raisins in a fruitcake? Me neither. Atomic content lacks the core of good travel information: the prose that binds it all together. A sentence or two telling me where to find cheap late-night eats and where to go for romantic haute cuisine dinners is a far more useful starting point than an alphabetically organized phonebook of restaurants.

People value a slice of good nutty cake far more highly that a bag of nuts.

But the biggest morsel to take away is this: travel itself is not atomic. Yes, there are occasions when I want to find an atom of information like “a good Chinese restaurant open for lunch in Northbridge”, but the true value of a guidebook is when it can help you with Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns“: the things I should know about a destination, but do not know to ask about. I will not Google “gem scams in Bangkok” if I have never heard of the Thai capital’s shifty diamond dealers; I will not take a 30-km detour to an awesome museum in a neighbouring town unless someone tells me it exists.

The way to compete against atomic content is thus not to play the atomic content game, at least not to the extent of letting it corrupt your core cake-baking skills. Bake cakes that are dense, filling, rich and nutty, which taste good from the first bite and leave the traveler hungry for more.

The chimera of social travel

Ever since Facebook set dollar signs spinning in venture capitalists’ eyes, the concept of social travel has been bandied about as the Next Big Thing in travel technology.

First came a wave of “Facebook for travel” sites that tried to build their own social networks, only with a travel focus. Crushed by the weight of the network effect, these all sank without a trace, with the qualified exception of TripIt, which survives more through its slick itinerary-building capabilities than through social networking.

Next Foursquare hit the scene, gaining critical mass through Facebook check-in notifications and proving that there was a market for “social-local-mobile” apps. The inevitable wave of “social-travel-mobile” copycats followed, all of which seemed primarily designed to lure you in with the promise of useful travel info while actually spamming the hell out of your Facebook, Twitter etc streams to entice more marks into their Ponzi scheme. A trendily spelling-impaired startup called Tripl has even come up with a pretty yet remarkably vapid infographic to justify its claims of “social travel revolution”, which can be summarized à la South Park as thus:

Travel is increasing.
Social networking is increasing.
Travelers use social networks.
???
Profit!

But the question I want to ask is: does social travel actually work? Let’s consider a simple thought experiment and find out.

So. I’m going to Milan for the first time and I want to know where to stay, what to see and what to eat. Will social travel help me? There are three possibilities.

Case 1: My social network has no people familiar with Milan.

If I know nobody in Milan, even on a “sat next to them on a flight once, exchanged business cards and added them on Facebook” level, then my social network can have no information about Milan. And when you think about it, this is actually a very, very common situation: you usually meet people from Milan when visiting Milan, not before. And even if you have already been to Disneyland, do you know anybody living there? Or even in Orlando?

Case 2: My social network has a good friend living in Milan.

Let’s say I do know somebody from Milan; maybe we met at university and have known each other for years, or maybe they visited my town on business and I took them around the sights. So when I visit Milan, gracious host that they are, they will return the favor and take me around in person. No social travel network needed.

Case 3: My social network has a friend who knows Milan well, but doesn’t actually live there.

My friend Svetlana has been to Milan at least ten times and would love to tell me all her favorite places, like the five-star hotel with a fabulous spa she stays at, all the chic handbag boutiques she visits, plus a wonderful cramped little restaurant in a cellar that serves divine pizza by candlelight. Kind and generous soul that she is, she’s even taken the time to type all these up on a social travel site, complete with accurate addresses and opening hours. Surely this is a social travel match made in heaven?

Alas, no. My budget extends to three stars tops, so her hotel is out; I’m a guy, so I have a distinctly limited need for designer fashion accessories with four-figure pricetags; and we’re bringing along the baby, so late dinners are out and we choose lunch restaurants based on availability of highchairs and staff that won’t throw a hissy fit when Jr. smears pureed broccoli all over the table. So I can’t actually use any of her recommendations.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, incompatible travel profiles like this are pretty much the rule rather than the exception. Think back to your last casual conversation with somebody who had recently been to a place you were going to. How much genuinely useful travel information did you manage to glean from them? If you were lucky, maybe a burger joint or microbrewery worth checking out, but would it be enough to replace your guidebook?

(The reverse of this explains why local sites that operate where you live and have lots of friends do work: while most of your local friends probably do not share your interest in Japanese food or the perfect cappuccino, enough of them do that they will share interesting new places on a regular basis. Also, since you’re living there instead of traveling, you’re not pressed for time: if I live in Milan and my local friend recommends a Mexican place, I’ll probably go check it out at some point, but if I’m there only for a weekend, I’ll stick to Italian.)

The final nail in the coffin is that while sharing your favorite spots at a dinner party with someone you know is effortless and fun, it’s fairly tedious to type them up in a social networking site at a usable level of detail. While on a fully open travel site like Wikitravel you can at least bask in the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that your handiwork will be read by thousands, on a social network that restricts visibility to people who know you, the odds of anybody actually ever seeing or caring what you write is low indeed.

And that’s it: the inescapable conclusion is that your social network is very likely to be useless for actual travel. Not a few startups have realized this problem, and have tried to figure out ways to lower the bar. Maybe they can find you an in-person guide by being a de facto dating service like Tripl and any number of “X with a local” sites tries to do, or maybe they can show everybody everybody’s contributions and hope you can make some sense of it (I’m looking at you, TripAdvisor), or maybe they can sprinkle in lots of content from experts like Lonely Planet and Frommers (hi there, Wenzani!). But each of these actually involves going outside your social network, and thus loses the main point of social networking: that these recommendations come from people you know and trust, not random strangers.

This is not to say that social networks don’t have their place in a traveler’s repertoire: Facebook is great for keeping touch with acquaintances around around the globe, and any local site can give me good recommendations in places new to me if I can just be specific enough about what I want and where. There’s also plenty of room for improvement, since most user-generated travel sites out there do a really bad job of using user reputation and nth-degree connections to sort out the bacon from the spam, and I’m mildly amazed that none of the major networks have taken a leaf from Dopplr‘s book and implemented a notification service that lets you know when visitors are heading your way. But social travel alone is not going to be the killer app for travel.

User-generated content: what went wrong and why it still matters

The buzzword user-generated content (UGC), aka “crowdsourcing”, is starting to sound a little 2007, with the cool kids having moved on to hype social travel, itself a subject worthy of a future post. So what was the original promise, why didn’t it pan out as expected, and is there still a future for it?

The Promise

I’ll lay my own bias on the line up front: I’ve been contributing to wiki-style “user-generated” sites like Everything2, Wikipedia and Wikitravel for over ten years now, and was sufficiently impressed by the last of these to throw away a steady job and take a stab at spinning off Wikitravel Press as a commercial publishing business. Coming from a software development background and thus familiar with the battle between open source software created from the bottom-up vs closed, commercial software decreed from the top down (see Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar for a primer), it seemed obvious that the traditional cathedral model of guidebook publishers deciding what to sell, toiling away behind high walls to package it up, and selling the end result at a stiff markup was doomed to eventually lose to the raucous bazaar of travellers swapping free tips online, with the cream percolating to the top in the spirit of same happy collaborative anarchy that created Wikipedia.

My initial experiences at Lonely Planet only served to reinforce my belief. Until recently, the company has revolved entirely around a well-oiled machine for turning authors’ raw manuscripts into polished guidebooks, with tight focus and strict quality control, and this model has served them well over the 38 years that they were competing against other guidebook publishers trying to do the same. But now that the competition can get their content for free from countless contributors around the globe and distribute it at virtually zero cost, how can they possibly afford to keep paying not just the writers themselves, but editors, proofreaders, cartographers etc as well?

The Reality

Funny thing is, it turns out that crowdsourced content in general (and travel content in particular) isn’t quite the panacea people expected to be. A few user-generated travel sites have certainly prospered, most notably TripAdvisor, which takes the hands-off approach of letting anybody post anything about everything and leaving it to the reader to sort out the wheat from the chaff, providing only a taxonomy of places and points of interest for navigating through it all. This works great if you already have a hotel or two in mind, want to read about them in detail, and have your bullshit detector fine-tuned well enough to filter out the reviews by touts and fruitcakes; alas, it’s next to useless if you’re trying to, say, find a nice winery inn to stay in Melbourne’s Yarra Valley, since information about regions is hopelessly scattered, or even a nice, affordable hotel in Tokyo, since you’re given a list of 640 and made to sort through them yourself, with no way to figure out if you should be basing yourself in Shibuya or Shinjuku.

Wikitravel set out to address this by taking a leaf from Wikipedia’s book and allowing users to edit as well as write, with the explicit goal of creating a readable end-to-end travel guide, instead of just a scattershot collection of factoids and opinions. Now eight years old, the site is still trundling along and even slowly increasing its Alexa rank as of late, but it has never quite achieved the mass-market impact of Wikipedia. The reasons why are varied and complex, and being taken over in 2006 by a used-car company and frozen in time interface-wise probably didn’t help, but at the end of the day the problem may boil down to a series of fundamental tensions between the open-to-all wiki model and the intention of a travel guide:

Wikitravel is meant to serve travellers, but it’s business owners that benefit the most from a good review. Thus, while each traveller has a weak individual interest in ensuring that each entry is accurate and realistic, the business owner of that entry has a very strong incentive to ensure that it does not. This is much less so at Wikipedia, where articles are rarely used by consumers to make purchasing decisions.
Wikipedia has an explicit goal of creating a neutral encyclopedia and a raft of policies that work towards this end: points of view, citations, references, etc. Wikitravel has to rely on the subjective opinions of anonymous travellers, and when they are in conflict, it is not possible to say who is “right” and who is “wrong”: the only possible route is to strip out anything disputable and leave behind bland trivia. This is not helped by the steady stream of Wikipedians coming in under the misconception that, as in Wikipedia, dull, unopinionated writing is a good thing.
If writing a neutral review is hard enough, then curating a neutral list of top attractions, best places to eat etc is even harder, especially for country or region-level articles. These tend to be constantly subject to edit wars, with residents and business owners pitching for their own places and surreptitiously trying to remove others.

None of these forces are insurmountable, and those articles on Wikitravel that are watched like hawks by benevolent neutral caretakers can shine like finely polished jewels, but they do explain why the quality of Wikitravel articles varies so widely, why there are less truly usable Wikitravel articles than there are informative Wikipedia articles, and why none of the many companies out there trying to create automated guidebooks purely out of Wikitravel or other user-generated travel content have really pulled it off. Other travel wikis, like TripAdvisor’s Inside, lack Wikitravel’s sense of community and thus fare even worse on all counts, the odd quality contribution drowned in a sea of spam.

Nevertheless, Wikitravel content is still used even by shiny new startups like Triposo, simply because there is nothing better out there. The traveller, however, is not thus constrained, and that’s why they still willingly pay a premium to the traditional guidebook publishers for guaranteed quality, coverage and cohesiveness.

The Future

What then? In the PC industry, the epic battle between open-source Linux and closed-source Windows fizzled out when Apple came out of the left field with OS X, which married open-source internals (Darwin) with a closed-source user interface (Aqua) smoothing out all the warts. OS X now runs not only in Macs, but (disguised as iOS) in iPhones and iPads. Apple pulled ahead of Microsoft in stock market valuation last year.

Likewise, I suspect the winner of the travel sweepstakes will be neither “UGC” nor “experts” alone, but the first travel company that manages to harness together a solid base of open content to build on, the raw power of a million travelers contributing and correcting, the iron fist of editors and curators pummelling it into shape, and the slick usability of a professionally designed and laid-out travel guide. The pain point is money: pulling this together will not come cheap and the days of people paying $50 for a travel guide are almost over, yet in order to take off, the content must be deep, open to the world and not plastered with blinking banner ads. Who will dare to take on the challenge?

Welcome

Welcome to Gyrovague, my virtual soapbox for inflicting my opinions on travel and technology on the unsuspecting public. In particular, this blog will attempt to answer the question: why is there still no digital killer app that finally obsoletes printed guidebooks, and what do we need to do to create one?

In tune with my omnivorous medieval f orebears, topics planned for the itinerant wanderings of the near future include why user-generated content still matters, the new chimera of social travel, and the heresies of inspirational travel and atomic content.

Enough said – let’s hit the road.