Web Thoughts

Just Another Web 2.0 Blog
Search

Where is my Travel 2.0? – Part 1: The Long Tail

30 Jul

Posted by domi as travel 2.0, web 2.0

Unsurprisingly, people are using the web more and more for virtually anything including of course travel and holiday planing and booking. For example in Germany

As information and booking medium, the Internet is becoming more and more important for the tourism sector, too. At the beginning of 2007, 39% of Germans had already used the Internet to search for information on holidays – almost three times as many as 6 years earlier. And even though there are clearly less internet bookers than information seekers, the growth of bookings through the internet is very impressive. With 19% having already booked online, the number is almost 5 times as high as in 2001. (The 37th Reiseanalyse RA 2007)

And equally unsurprising there are new travel web sites springing up every day claiming trying to monetize help people getting where they might never thought they want to go on our crowded planet while paying close to nothing.

And of course all these are immensely web2.0-ish, aren’t they? Let’s recall what the godfather of everything that exhibits a network component, Tim O’Reilly, defined as being Web 2.0™

  1. The Long Tail
  2. Data is the Next Intel Inside
  3. Users Add Value
  4. Network Effect (by default)
  5. Some Rights Reserved ™
  6. The Perpetual Beta
  7. Cooperate, Don’t Control
  8. Software Above the Level of a Single Device

Lets apply these patterns to nowadays travel 2.0 applications. I will argue that a travel 2.0 application/platform that will live up to our precious “2.0″ vision must not only incorporate one but at least some of these aspects. For those of you who hoped to read some concluding remarks, they somehow will be sprinkled all over the next posts and I shall draw some final conclusions after I covered all points.

The Long Tail

This phrase has recently gained popularity been coined by Chris Anderson who then went on to serve the fat peak with his equally named book (I won’t charge you for this one, Chris). The concept is not a new one, though fully embracing it’s impacts clearly leads to a fairly new approach for business design.

What does the long tail of the travel industry look like? There are certainly several different dimensions to be considered. An obvious one (which doesn’t solely apply to travelling but rather everything) is the price scale, but I like to call it the Bling-Bling Dimension: This goes from “Gimme ten bucks and I’ll let you camp in my backyard” to “Let’s rent an whole tropical island for 10 grants per day”. Demand can be low (but sustainable) because the offer is situated in extreme regions of the Bling-Bling Dimension.

Furthermore, there is some kind of Freak Dimension: Some folks are seeking for particularly hard-to-recreate holiday experiences: Tree houses, Igloos, submarine boat trips and oil-rig hotels, my backyard, you name it.

From freakiness it’s not far to the Desert Dimension. There are lots of places within highly crowded areas that are scarcely demanded, like my backyard for instance. But there are also a lot of places you simply don’t travel to mainly because nobody else does. The Antarctica, Iraq, the moon…

As I write (and you read) this, there may be more and more dimensions and patterns of complexity popping into our minds, but for now I’m happy with having articulated at least three obvious ones. If you got some more – let me know. My next post will then be about what Timmy calls “Data is the Next Intel Inside” and I refer to as the user-powered data-drivenness of long-tailed web thingies. Very 2.0…

List of Shopping 2.0 and Social Shopping Sites

29 Jul

Posted by domi as shopping 2.0, web 2.0, weblist

In my previous post I enfranchised my travel bookmarks. Today comes the day of deliverance for all shopping bookmarks. As before, the list is not very well structured and I do apologize for that. A nice way to sort it would be to classify the sites as alternative product search mechanisms in one of the following categories (as suggested here):

  1. Product, Price, Brand & Seller Comparison Shopping Engines
  2. Deal Finders, Bargain Hunter & Discounted Shopping Engines
  3. Social Shopping, Product Sharing & Recommendation Engines
  4. Shopping Wikis, Buyers Reporting & Shopping Guide Engines
  5. Consumer Reviews, Product Ratings & Consumer Guide Engines

Fresh

Fashion & Style

Unsorted

Deal Finder

Rate your socks off

List of Travel 2.0 and Social Travel Sites

27 Jul

Posted by domi as travel 2.0, web 2.0, weblist

For some time now I’ve been haphazardly bookmarking travel sites and – since we are where we are and when we are now – most of them can frivolously be slapped with a “web 2.0″ tag. As I haven’t seen many compilations on that topic I’m hereby ingenuously giving birth to yet another 2.0 weblist (gosh!). Please comment sweepingly and intensely (as you always do) since this list is obviously quite unformed and fragmentary and I’d love to see it being evolved with your help (for the sake of the crowded planet).

Update: I should note that most of the items below I’ve discovered while browsing similar lists on other blogs. For example here, here and there and many, many other places.

Communities – Wikis – Ratings/Reviews – Mashups

Booking

Miscellaneous

Travel Together

Travel videos

German

  

Categories

Recent Posts

Archives

about

This Blog is about web 2.0, the wisdom of crowds, the long tail, social networks, intrinsic collaboration and collective intuition in fine granularity. Of course I know what all this is all this is all about - otherwise I wouldn't be blogging about it, right?

Powered by WordPress - based on BloggingPro