great takes on family travel in the U.S.

Elisabeth Osmeloski (now at the vacation rentals site Zonder) just posted on Search Engine Watch about Travel Search 2.0 and I thought I’d add my own two cents (albeit more travel search centric view) to this topic.

Elizabeth:

As the OTA’s and the meta travel/comparison engines have become so firmly entrenched, the only thing to do is build upon the experience and create added value around the basic layer of content you have. It’s no longer enough to just push rates and dates — publishers must blend together a variety of information, including maps, user reviews, editorial reviews, images, a community platform, sharing widgets and bookmarking tools for trip planning assistance, and direction on the booking process to top it all off.

We couldn’t agree more. TravelMuse recently launched and I also had the opportunity to talk briefly with Kevin Fliess, founder and CEO of TravelMuse. As I blogged in my earlier post about travel planning, I’m excited about the rise of new travel planning startups like TravelMuse. My perspective is that travel planning is a complicated workflow (that often involves multiple people) and a variety of tools will emerge to serve this need. We do have the dream of integrating with a number of tools and community sites, but right now are dealing with post-launch startup issues like serving pages fast and keeping the servers up! So our brief chat with Kevin helped us think more broadly about how the travel landscape will look in the future.

So what is TravelMuse?

Destination Guides

Elizabeth does a good just summarizing the TravelMuse approach to Destination Guides. From Elizabeth:

The primary focus of the site is high quality content, with a blend of traditional travel journalism and articles that work especially well in the online and social media space (e.g., Top 10 lists). In almost “magazine” style, but unquestionably in a 2.0 format, publishing a new “issue” weekly with a healthy dose of high-quality photography, the content side of things is well covered, at least in the featured destinations done to date. On top of the editorial content, User-generated content (UGC) plays an enormous role.

TravelMuse won’t stop there. User-generated content and professional content working hand-in-hand is the approach that Kevin, Eric, and the team intends to take. For example, I posted a user review of the Le Meridien San Francisco page on TravelMuse just to try it out.

Inspiration Finder

TravelMuse has an interesting inspiration finder. The early stage of travel planning is indeed inspiration and discovery, and TravelMuse has developed an interesting “wizard” like approach that allows you to express what you want:

TravelMuse Planner

The TravelMuse Planner has two components. One is a cool bookmarklet tool that allows you to clip any page on the Web and add it to your itinerary.

It then has a Trip Planner that organizes all the content into one area.

I was even able to add the San Diego things to do page from Kango.com on this planning tool!

TravelMuse

TravelMuse is trying to address the early inspiration, discovery and planning phase of travel planning. They are trying to stitch together all phases of this initial process together in an integrated whole. My experience as an end user is as follows:

1. Destination guides provided great professional editorial and great photos. It is truly an inspiring site with great visuals and great ideas for travel. The large number of themes supported also address the inspiration and dreaming phase of trip planning.
2. Trip Planner. There is definitely use for a trip planner, and I really like the idea of a bookmarklet. TravelMuse has done it well and allows you to tag Web pages as a specific type of travel product so it is better organized in your trip planner. Disclosure: Uptake also has what we call a “trip folder” in the Alpha stage and we expect a bookmarklet to be included in that tool as well.
3. Trip Inspiration Tool. The wizard approach is a fun way to discover different destinations. However, there should be more ways to change the criteria you used on the suggestion page. For example, I initially chose “within 4 hours” of SFO and then later I wanted to go “within 2 hours” of SFO and had to redo the whole search. There should be some adjustment right there on the inspiration page.

TravelMuse is bringing much needed innovation to the travel space and we expect they will play a role in revolutionizing the way people use the Web to plan travel!

Forgive me for going off topic. This post is about a panel I attended at the Supernova Conference 2008 called “All the World’s a Game” (workshops list) about how massively multiplayer games bleed over into real life, or at least highlight certain important dynamics that can be seen in Web 2.0 community sites or society in general.

Can any of these insights be applied toward Uptake, search/discovery, and travel planning? Not sure. But thinking about it!

The Panel

The panel was moderated by Susan Wu of Charles River Ventures . Panelists were:

1. Raph Koster, President of Metaplace (bio, blog, essays, presentations, Metaplace )
2. Doug Thomas, Professor of Communications at USC (bio, bio, You Play WoW? You’re Hired in Wired 04/06, WoW Factor at ojr.org, The Play of Imagination Beyond the Literary Mind (doc) with John Seely Brown on HASTAC.org, What kids learn in virtual worlds on CNET, The Gamer Disposition on Conversation Starter blog at HBS Publishing which summarizes his presentation at Supernova)
3. Dave Elfving, Information Architect at Apple (LinkedIn, Twitter, dormant website )

Summary (a few points to encourage you to read the whole write-up!)

1. Raph shared about “emergent” play, like endgame raids in World of Warcraft and Everquest (aka Evercrack) not originally envisioned by the game developers but created by the players.
2. Raph: “Humans enjoy transgressive play” and will always try to break free from the game constraints.
3. Doug’s thesis oversimplified is as follows: Gamers will be more successful in the future workplace than non-gamers, because of five key characteristics of the gamer’s disposition: (1) Gamers have a bottom-line mentality, (2) Gamers understand the value of diversity, (3) Gamers thrive on change, (4) Gamers see learning as fun, (5) Gamers tend to marinate on the edge.
4. Dave said that “it freaks him out” that the Web communities he build have the same, fundamental game mechanics as online games like World of Warcraft. Are we destined to create games that follow that pattern and will we live in a flattened world because of it?
5. Dave invoked the eerie story of Japanese schoolchildren obsessing over “shiny balls of mud” called dorodango and creating an external evaluative process to allocate status and distinction based on expertise gained through repetitive practice creating these balls of mud. Is this simply the human condition? Do game and Web designers accentuate these hard-wired tendencies? Or do we have freedom to choose the future we want?
6. Doug: “what i’m concerned is that kids are being trained to be consumers. In Hello Kitty, Barbie Girls, and Club Penguin, citizenship is being a good consumer.”

Many more points below.

Raph Koster (Metaplace)

‘Fessing up, I missed Raph’s presentation because of traffic. Sorry Raph! Hopefully someone else will post about this and I will aggregate it here. For now, you can nosh on his keynote entitled “The Core of Fun” from ETECH 2007.

Some of the points he made later in the discussion:

1. In response to Dave Elfving’s concerns about designers being trapped into a “gamist” mentality (more on this later), Raph responded that “games are indeed reductionist. All games resolve to mathematic models.” There is the danger that game designers fall into the trap of reinforcing simplistic but effective mechanisms for addictive play. But gamers are capable of transcending simple game mechanisms to create “play” that was not originally envisioned by game designers.
2. For example, World of Warcraft is not about raiding (where a large group of high-level players engage in coordinated action in several separate teams to take down a “boss”). Everquest was not about raiding. Raiding was designed by high level players in Everquest. the actual game is killing mosters. The users created the raid. Raiding is not really part of the game of World of Warcraft. Raiding was “tacked on at the end of the game.”
3. On the difference between playing World of Warcraft and raiding: “We’ve all been asked to go to dances. And forced to learn to dance. Endless succession of middle school dances, proms, etc….and then at the end of the game, you are asked to join a ballet company…synchronized collective action by a number of skilled players.“
4. Flickr was originally a MMO called “game never ending”. You could post photos as part of the game. But then they slimmed back their plan and
5. “Humans enjoy transgressive play with game models.” People try to break out of the channels provided by the game. Raph gave an example of his son. First, “he hacked the game. Then what becomes a hack becomes a cheat code. Then, he look for hacks beyond the cheat code. Then we bought the PC version of the game to hack the data files. Finally, one eventually turns into a game designer.” (Not sure this is normal behavior and there was some comment that his son must be exceptional).
6. There is Player vs. Environment (PvE), and Player vs. Player (PvP). How about “PvD” or Player vs. Developer? Raph suggested that “there is a sense that the developers want me to do this…well screw them…I’ll find a different way to do things”

Doug Thomas (USC)

Network of Imagination

Doug started with a framework called the “Network of Imagination” with three components:

1. Network of Practice
2. Community of Interest
3. Co-presence

I didn’t really get the point of this. Doug? [Placeholder for explanation]

The Five Things That Characterize Gamer Disposition

Doug then went into five things characterizing gamer disposition. This was awesome! It is also summarized on a Harvard Business School Publishing blog called ConversationStarter (which I will quote from liberally here). Doug makes the claim that gamers are better equipped than non-gamers to handle the workplace of the future:

More than attitudes or beliefs, these attributes are character traits that players bring into game worlds and that those worlds reinforce. We believe that gamers who embody this disposition are better able than their nongamer counterparts to thrive in the twenty-first-century workplace. Why?

1. Gamers are bottom-line oriented

From the post:

Today’s online games have embedded systems of measurement or assessment. Gamers like to be evaluated, even compared with one another, through systems of points, rankings, titles, and external measures. Their goal is not to be rewarded but to improve. Game worlds are meritocracies where assessment is symmetrical (leaders are assessed just as players are), and after-action reviews are meaningful only as ways of enhancing individual and group performance.

In the panel, Doug made the following points:

• Gamers are focused on competency. “For example, a Boss fight in WoW can take 45 min. If one person screws up they can take down the entire raid. This is called a wipe.”
• Competence is more important than superstar quality. You’d pick 25 competent people every time vs. 5 superstars + 20 ok people.

I’m not sure I think this is true for gamers who are not raiding or playing instances with large parties. It also seems endgame specific, and not applicable to grinding it out to Level 60.

Doug provided an interesting example with a user created site called WoWWebstats. (image)

These stats provide detailed player stats on a raid. He claimed that they were used to help put together complementary raid groups and not to criticize individual player performance. I find this hard to believe. In any case, this is a “powerful diagnostic tool to engage in joint coordination action together,” according to Doug. He also mentioned “knowledge as a place, not a thing,” and that people would just tell people to get info at Thottbot, a Wikipedia (or maybe Freebase) for World of Warcraft information.

2. Gamers understand the power of diversity

From the post:

Diversity is essential in the world of the online game. One person can’t do it all; each player is by definition incomplete. The key to achievement is teamwork, and the strongest teams are a rich mix of diverse talents and abilities. The criterion for advancement is not “How good am I?”; it’s “How much have I helped the group?” Entire categories of game characters (such as healers) have little or no advantage in individual play, but they are indispensable members of every team.

I like playing healers. But again, this seems reinforced by the specific game design in WoW.

3. Gamers thrive on change

From the post:

Nothing is constant in a game; it changes in myriad ways, mainly through the actions of the participants themselves. As players, groups, and guilds progress through game content, they literally transform the world they inhabit. Part of the gamer disposition is grounded in an expectation of flux. Gamers do not simply manage change; they create it, thrive on it, seek it out.

Gamers have the expectation that things are constantly changing. It is one of the qualities that define the workplace today.

4. Gamers see learning as fun

From the post:

For most players, the fun of the game lies in learning how to overcome obstacles. The game world provides all the tools to do this. For gamers, play amounts to assembling and combining tools and resources that will help them learn. The reward is converting new knowledge into action and recognizing that current successes are resources for solving future problems.

5. They tend to “Marinate on the Edge”

Funny. I understand Edge but not Marinate. From the post:

Finally, gamers often explore radical alternatives and innovative strategies for completing tasks, quests, and challenges. Even when common solutions are known, the gamer disposition demands a better way, a more original response to the problem. Players often reconstruct their characters in outrageous ways simply to try something new. Part of the gamer disposition, then, is a desire to seek and explore the edges in order to discover some new insight or useful information that deepens one’s understanding of the game.

Doug said that there is a lot of social capital created to “be the first to do “x”".

Some of Doug’s final conclusions:

1. Knowledge moves from being a system of static information to a system of “constant knowing”
2. Knowledge becomes a place rather than a thing. Example: Thottbot.
3. Affordances spring up in the world. For example, people can build Add Ons so they can modify their own UI for handling information.
4. Susan asked: “do Gamers have to be “bottom line” oriented? does it have to be that way? Do games have to reduce our identities to numbers?” Doug answered: “Yes and No. The bottom line element is always there. Players want a metric to be evaluated against other players.”
5. Doug: “However, there are slso a set of measures that are more aesthetic. For example, in Star Wars Galaxies, people used in-game elements for interior design, creating bowling alleys, casinos and forums for interior decorating. But then there would be voting and scoring of the creations. There is a constant push into evaluation about myself vs. others.”
6. Doug: “The standard model is money and points, but there may be other ways.”

Dave Elfving (Apple)

Dave Elfving raised some seriously interesting points that I would summarize as follows:

1. Dave is familiar with game dynamics and WoW because he leveled up a character “just” to L65.
2. There is a tremendous amount of repetition, otherwise known as “the grind” to get access to certain boss, certain dungeon, or approval of a certain guild.
3. Quests at level 65 are essentially the same as Level 1. (Elliott: By the way, I hope that’s the case because I personally hate escort quests the most and there aren’t any of those at Level 1).
4. As I collect objects, my character gets more “shiny”…his character gets visibly more attractive.
5. People judge you by your level and your matched armor set. There are visible signs of status and distinction that causes one to aspire to gain the objects that are desirable and signal success.
6. To achieve success, and the acceptance of your peers, you must go through the “grind”

This would be all fine and good, except there seems to be bleed through of these concepts to the real world:

1. In his work as an information architect (previously at Solution Set) chartered with designing social applications, Dave found that his community designs “ape” games dynamics in WoW.
2. This “freaks him out” because it works and “I don’t know if I have a better solution”
3. Dave doesn’t know if we want to build communities that are solely defined by these game mechanics.

More discussion on this topic can be found on the Terranova website/blog.

Shiny Balls of Mud (aka hikaru dorodango)

Dave read an article about schoolchildren in Japan - Durodango is a “shiny ball of mud” - a type of play that Japanese school children have embraced. You get some mud and drying it to make it very shiny. Takes a lot of repetition to make it look good. Then there is an external evaluative process imposed on the community. A child’s sentiment might be: here is my “Level 65″ dorodango . Outward display of reputation. Hikaru dorodango is similar to process of leveling up a WoW character.

Does it have to be this way?

Dave provided online examples of external signals of reputation:

• Metafilter : low user number, and number of times favorited by others
• Flickr : can get feedback ordered by “interestingness” determined by community - viewed, favorited, comments

Dave’s final parting comments: “When I’m tasked to create a community, I’m tasked to create metrics like WoW. The way we evaluate each other is based on increasing metrics, numerical quantification that can be loaded into a database. What I hope to see in the future in games is what gets away from this. But a game that got rid of this…would it still be fun?”

A mind-blowing Supernova discussion.

I’m at a Supernova panel called Liquid Conversations that is generally about the migration of comments and participants away from the blog and to other venues, like Seesmic, CoComment, Twitter, FriendFeed , Disqus. It started out as “Who Owns My Comments 101″ and then went in some other interesting directions.

Dave McClure moderated the panel. Social media A-Listers Loic LeMeur (Seesmic), Matt Colebourne (CoComment), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), and David Sifry (OffBeat Guides previously Technorati).

1. Fragmentation is our friend, not our enemy

So far, the most interesting example was given by Bret Taylor , founder of FriendFeed. When Barack Obama gained the delegates needed for the Democratic candidates, 1000s of conversations about the nomination cropped up on FriendFeed. But because the distribution of these discussions were fragmented across many different posts and shared items, they became more:

• semi-private or at least opt-in
• more intimate
• more in depth or meaningful
• anchored by more shared context or at least a real identity

These became more useful than “people yelling at each other” in the comments section of the NewYorkTimes website.

Bret called this the “power of distributed conversation” and is a very subtle point that helps explain why Twitter and FriendFeed have been so useful as a selective and personalized information filter for people.

Implications for designers of social applications: Fragmentation helps people come up with a much more personalized set of conversations, and insures that they don’t get drowned out by the loudest and most common news and information that floods all channels. Don’t make it TOO easy to find people, and don’t make it TOO easy to find the most popular feeds. Create space for a more idiosyncratic, personal space.

2. Soon we will have the rise of the celebrity commenter and comment DJ artist

According to Matt Colebourne of CoComment, just as we had the rise of celebrity bloggers, we will in the future have celebrity commenters or as Dave McClure sez, “comment DJ artist.”

My first reaction was “no!” Its hard to “shape” the conversation without long-form written content. But then I thought about examples where “celebrity commenters” or “DJ artists” already exist:

• Wikipedia
• Wikihow
• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• Forums and BBS
• Facebook

Personal reputation can be built on different platforms. But reputation requires a long-term interaction through that medium with a community around a specific topic or interest. All the more reason to tie your username and identity in one system to another.

3. Nirvana of universal flow between one system to another is not a standards or business issue but “impedence mismatch between one service vs. another”

Several people brought up the issue of sharing information back and forth. Bret Taylor gave the simple example: “if you are posting a reply from FriendFeed to Twitter what happens to the 140 character limit?” Do we split it into two Tweets?

Aside from basic bookmarking, its just as likely that these platforms will actually diverge rather than converge in order to become differentiated participation platforms. So an “impedence mismatch” happens when objects to be shared are in different forms in different systems.

This seems like a reasonable explanation for why it will take time for systems to be interoperable. I personally don’t have any real interest in following the progress of standards efforts, many of which are likely doomed to failure.

Other Supernova2008 coverage

Summize search for Supernova OR Supernova2008, TechCrunch, NextWeb, KennethCarter, DNWallace, Sanford Dickert

In addition to launching UpTake, I have also been following the tragic news of the Sichuan earthquake and feeling powerless to help. On my non-UpTake related personal China blog, CNReviews, we created a Sichuan earthquake donation directory with now over 40 methods for contributing. Then a designer named Oliver Ding, who I didn’t know, created a great SlideShare of the post. The country is now starting a three day period of mourning. The impact on the country is probably comparable to the impact of 9/11 on people in the U.S.

Please consider making a small financial contribution to one of these agencies, and also consider ways to help in the Myanmar cyclone disaster which will likely have even more fatalities due to barriers to aid put up by the Myanmar government.

Days before launch, we wondered if bloggers and users would understand the fundamental shift our site was making away from the “price & book model of online travel” to the real reasons people travel.

Vacation planning is rarely just about price. Most travelers have a vision in mind: from escaping the routine, seeking a new adventure, re-connecting with family or developing a budding romance. Uptake, of course wants to help people book (how much & when) but more than that, we want people to discover a trip based on who they are going with and why they are taking a vacation.

We also wondered if we had succeeded in simplifying the process. We wanted to offer an alternative to the standard travel planning process of visiting multiple sites before booking a vacation. Couldn’t that information be consolidated, organized and delivered to make it easier?

Since our public beta launch on Wednesday, we were pleasantly surprised by the attention we received from top bloggers and pleased they understood the power of one site aggregating information and organizing it for travelers who needed more than the lowest price to decide on a trip.

Here is what they had to say:
AppScout saw the power of capturing 20 million opinions and data from 1000 sites in one place, “Tired of searching through dozens of Web sites to find everything you need to plan the vacation of your dreams? Now with the public beta launch of UpTake (formerly called Kango; see our preview here), you can plan the trip of a lifetime all in one place–as long as it’s in the U.S, for now.”

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch suggests travelers use UpTake for specific types of trips, “If you are looking for ideas for a family vacation, a pet-friendly hotel, or the perfect place for a romantic weekend, try travel search engine UpTake.” They liked the SEO work we had done to help travelers get to the right page, right away– we realize most travel planners start at search and we wanted them to find us. “Google already loves UpTake’s results. To see its semantic SEO magic at work, try searching for “pet friendly hotels gilroy” or “family hotels” and the name of any city in California. A result with a Kango URL will likely pop up near the top.”

“ZDNet Blogs likes our hotel detail and our use of semantics to enrich the experience. “Digging into the detailed listing for the hotel itself, the site does a nice job of summarizing sentiment from across the main review sites.”

“It’s an interesting concept, and one that - in principle at least - does a good job of applying some semantic techniques to enrich the experience without forcing the traveler to interact much differently than they would with a regular travel site.”

Mashable! states that we are “quick to get you where you want to go and offers plenty of search refinements. They also said, “UpTake’s search engine is pretty much its best feature.”

Budget Travel thought we were “innovative.” “A revamped and renamed website has debuted today with a clever twist on travel planning. “They liked the design changes we had made since private beta, “UpTake has now become much bolder.”

They thought our theme based travel was easy to use. “Uptake also makes it easier for you to do “theme-based” travel searching, such as a search for “”girls-getaways” or “pet-friendly” in, say, Las Vegas.”

Josh Catone at ReadWriteWeb discussed our approach to semantics, “The ontology is a lot more focused and the site also isn’t trying to answer specific questions, but rather attempting to semantically determine general concepts, such as romanticness or overall quality. The upshot is that the results are tangible and useful…Beng able to search millions of reviews and opinions and have a computer understand how they relate to the type of vacation you want to take is the sort of palpable evidence needed to sell the Semantic Web idea.”

Search Engine Land understood idea of aggregating opinions created trustworthy results, “It also presents ratings from third party sites side-by-side so that users can gain a consensus view of the hotel’s quality and service. This is very helpful because no single travel site can be entirely trusted.”

Les Explorers interviewed VP of Marketing, Elliott Ng about his vision on our site’s future, the changes in our blog and our deep involvement with the travel industry blogs known as the T-list.

Blissful Travel described us as a site where “you can search and find hotels anywhere in the U.S., read opinions from other travelers and also discover what to do at your chosen destination.” A nice summary.

TechBays stated “UpTake is a travel site that wants to be your first destination when planning for trips.”

Winser-Traveller calls us the, “One-Stop-Travel Service.”

Integration of Business Information Systems: Ibis Cluster discussed sentiment analysis, “One of the more recent Natural Language Processing Techniques Uptake applies is Sentiment Analysis, also referred to as Opinion Mining, which uses syntactic parsing to extract words to indicate, for example, favorable sentiment towards a hotel, such as “good time”, “fantastic view” or “relaxed atmosphere”, and distinguishes positive sentiment from negative sentiment.”

We appreciate the reviews, remarks and suggestions. We hope you take a look at UpTake if you want to search for the right vacation for you.

UPDATE: 10:15 AM - thoughtful coverage from AltSearchEngines (interview, announcement), ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, The Semantic Web, Search Engine Land, AppScout, Creative Think, Mashable, Washington Post, Budget Travel, Blissful Travel, TechBays, CNReviews (Elliott’s blog), L-Experiences, Moraaz.org, E-Marketing, Winser-Traveller, Ibis Cluster, Rootly, NoBosh, Les Explorers, MarketWire, Zedomax Network, Texas Word Tangle, WebGuild, ChristineLu, Wandalust, HomeExchangeTravel, FlyAway Weblog, WebSearchGuide.ca, WebWorkerDaily, WebGuild, ZedoMax, JourneyEtc, more to come. We’ll post later this week with responses to all the feedback we are getting from the blogosphere!

This morning, we’ll be celebrating the opening of UpTake to the public!

We created UpTake so you can sit in that beach chair above, having a great vacation, confident you made the very best decisions you could with your scarce time and dollars!

What’s new with UpTake?

UpTake [logo], formerly Kango, is a travel search application that helps travelers make better decisions by providing recommendations based on analyzing over 20 million opinions from thousands of websites. More details are on our press release. Here’s what’s new:

• UpTake now covers the entire United States–over 20,000 destinations across the 50 states.
• We’ve got the largest travel database on the Web, with over 400,000 U.S. hotels and attractions.
• We’re launching two more themes: “girls-getaways” and “pet-friendly.” [screenshot] Just like our original “romantic” and “family friendly” themes, these ratings [screenshot] are driven by our database of 20 million opinions
• Launched new check rates button to check rates at multiple booking engines. [screenshot]
• Home page is simple and relaxing! [screenshot]

If you’re a blogger, journalist, or just curious, we have lots of other info here, including our logo, releases, our RSS feeds, quotes, company timeline, bios, photos, recommended travel blogs, and my Twitter account!

Some example searches for you to try…

Feel free to just go to the home page and start searching! Or if you want to jump right to a couple examples, look at: San Francisco Hotels, San Francisco Family Hotels, San Francisco Family Things to Do.

…or you can just watch this video (thanks DemoGirl).
We still want your feedback!

Our U.S. hotels search is in “beta” and our U.S. activities is still in “almost beta” as we add more data sources and activity types. So keep the suggestions coming so we can build a truly great travel search site.

On behalf of co-founders Yen Lee and Gene McKenna, I want to thank all of you for your support and help!

VentureBeat calls us “opinions super-site.” I like it, even though I didn’t come up with it.

VentureBeat just posted a great overview of the information out there on UpTake (formerly Kango) to date while we’ve been in private beta, and shared (with our permission) the launch date, May 14. We’re getting close! The team is really excited!

The post called us an “opinions super-site” for travel. I like it! I love this description and wonder why none of us ever thought of this term! But, in fact, that is exactly what we are doing: aggregating opinions and word of mouth. This is open-source marketing at its best…

This post is a great close to our private beta period, and I’m getting nostalgic about this period already!

…and some thoughts on press and blogger outreach since that’s what I’m doing right now before our May 14 announcement

As we’ve been moving into high gear in preparation for our launch, we’ve been touching base with a diverse group of mainstream media, tech and travel industry press and bloggers. For other startups, I would like to propose this:

Elliott’s proposed Golden Rule of PR and Blogger Outreach:

If you don’t think you can learn something from a reporter or blogger, then you probably shouldn’t be pitching them.

In figuring out who to contact, I’ve been asking myself these Golden Questions:

1. Can I learn anything interesting by reading their blog?
2. Are there posts that relate to our story? If they wrote about us, what other previous posts on their blog could they link to?
3. If I were them, what would my post be about? How would I make it unique and fit the focus of their blog?

This is much harder work than a massive email blast. But back to the Golden Rule. Talk to people that you can learn from. Don’t talk to people that have nothing to teach.

Pitchmeme: Teh tricky new world of pitching bloggers and media

I’ve been on Twitter following the growing “pitchmeme” of bloggers complaining about PR people. Follow enough people on Twitter and you’ll hear the complaints. So for all the other startups, let me save you some pain and suffering and provide you with some pointers on how to pitch and how not to pitch from bloggers and the experts themselves:

Brian Solis

If you only read 1 post, read this one from Brian Solis. He sums up the opinions of Marshall Kirkpatrick, Adam Ostrow, Tom Forenski, Robert Scoble, Merlin Mann, and Allen Stern. Guess what? They all want you to do something different! Read this post!

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb

In Five Wrong Ways to Pitch RWW and One Great Way, Marshall outlines these 5 no-no’s:

1. Email the wrong email address
2. Phone calls
3. Twitter, Especially DM
4. Facebook
5. IM

A Great Way to Do It: By RSS. Wow. A great idea. Bloggers live inside of Google Reader. Why not send them info via RSS feedreader? Of course this doesn’t handle embargo’ed news like what we will be announcing May 14!

By the way, if you really want to irk ReadWriteWeb, call them “RRW” instead of “RWW”!

Louis Gray

If you’re pitching Louis Gray, you can only pitch me in reverse polish notation or pig latin. Louis is one of my favorite bloggers but the UpTake story just doesn’t fit into his coverage area of RSS addicts, FriendFeed addicts, Twitterholics, and the earliest of the early adopters. He covers Stowe Boyd, Robert Scoble (2007), and Marshall Kirkpatrick’s directions.

So what do we have here, just in these three examples? We have three prominent bloggers with three very highly differentiated, inefficient ways of soliciting engagement with public relations and companies…

Do you really think companies are going to remember to pitch Marshall at ReadWriteWeb via RSS and Stowe Boyd by TwitPitch and Scoble by Facebook? Knowing PR companies, I know they won’t. Most of them still believe in the spray and pray method of e-mailing all contacts under the sun. There needs to be change, but making everybody jump through hoops while losing the personal engagement, exclusivity and timing won’t work.

Anyway, Scoble (2008) moved on from Facebook and now wants to get the pitches by Twitter. But not DM in twitter, @ message him. And if you don’t know what I just said, you’re hosed cause you aren’t on Twitter!

Chris Brogan

On What Tom Could Learn from Facebook, Chris gently chides Tom of Cxxxx who blasted him an embargo’ed press release without permission: “Opt in. SOCIAL network. It’s about getting to know me before you fart in my face.”

Chris then offers some insight (with my paraphrase) into Some Differences Between Pitching Mainstream Press and Bloggers:

• Bloggers often write from passion. This is a huge insight. Many bloggers do it as a labor of love for the topic. This can be different from some journalists covering a beat in a professional capacity.
• Bloggers have a bit more ego feeding required. take an effort to understand “what makes a certain blogger tick,” accordin to Chris.
• Bloggers like free prize inside experiences. What can you do to give me something special?
• Bloggers don’t have to be polite. (Then again I don’t have to pitch impolite people!)

TIP FOR MARKETERS AND PR PEOPLE: Best way to really grok this is to just start blogging. That’s what I did at CNReviews on China-related topics that have nothing to do with UpTake.

Rafe Needleman

Simple. Use email. Don’t use Facebook. And no matter what don’t use Plaxo!

 

Adam Ostrow

Adam Ostrow of Mashable and ReadBurner fame offers 12 tips for getting your Statup Featured on Mashable:

1. Be a cool product
2. Fit into Mashable’s “coverage universe”
3. Have not already been covered to death elsewhere
4. Submit to our Startup Review series
5. Personalize your pitch
6. Be concise
7. Come to our events…and pitch us your story in-person

He also offers 12 things not to do when pitching a story to Mashable:

1. Sending an invite from your app
2. referencing your media coverage on Mashable Competitors X, Y, Z
3. Private Message on Social Network
4. Trying a Backdoor…in other words, use their intake email at news@mashanble .com
5. Contacting Pete.
6. Unsolicited Phone CAalls
7. USING ALL CAPS
8. Misspelling our Names. Kristen Nicole i s Kristen, not Nicole. and Not Kristin either.
9. Trying to Setup a Lunch.
10. Not Including a URL
11. Not Offering a Preview of Your Private Beta
12. Pitching Old News.

Great advice, Adam.

CityMama

Here’s a Johnson and Johnson Blogger Relations disaster. Don’t throw an all-expenses paid blogger junket for Moms called Baby Camp and then disinvite bloggers for needing to attend BlogHer, having a breastfeeding baby, or a slung baby.

Stowe Boyd and the Twitpitches.

Don’t pitch Stowe Boyd except via Twitter. And here’s how:

Basically, I want companies to get their story down to a one-liner ‘escalator’ pitch — like 10 seconds long — which is going to force them to drop the superlatives and buzzwords and get to the heart of the matter.

A twitpitch takes the following form:

1. A twitter message of the form “@stoweboyd [pitch goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch”. (Note the #hashtag means that these will be accessible at www.hashtags.org/tag/twitpitch.)
2. A second, optional twitter of the form “@stoweboyd [single URL goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch”. Just one URL, please.
3. A third, optional twitter of the form “@stoweboyd [proposed time(s) to meet or call go here without the brackets] #twitpitch”.

That’s it.

Twitpitches that work — that interest me enough to warrant spending some time to find out more — will be retwittered on my @stoweboyd account, and here on my blog.

OK, not sure how this works for embargo’ed news. I’m confused. So I guess we won’t be talking to Stowe until the press release is out! Or maybe I’ll try twitpitching and just see what happens.

Fellow startup entrepreneurs, welcome to the new world of the pitchmeme! And watch out for our news on May 14!

Curious how travel bloggers and travel-interested Twitterers are using Twitter? I was, so I looked at the usage patterns of the 112 Twitter members of the T-List.

About the T-List Twitterati

First, some background. On 4/8, with the help of Guido van den Elshout of HappyHotelier, we created the T-list account (http://www.twitter.com/tlist) on Twitter that would represent a list of travel-interested bloggers and Twitterers. We created a list of the T-List Twitterati based on the original T-List concept pioneered by Kevin May, Mathieu Ouellet, Jens Threanhart, and HappyHotelier.

If you don’t know what the T-List is, what Twitter is, or what the T-List Twitterati is, start by reading our post on T-List does Twitter. Then check out TravelTwit, a cool Facebook like aggregator created by Chris Clarke (@Chrispitality) to see all the feeds of the T-List bloggers. BTW, if you want to join the T-List on Twitter, just Follow T-List and we’ll add you.

So how does the T-List Twitterati use Twitter?

During the past 10 days, triggered by a post by Louis Gray, the blogosphere had been vibrating with various methods of characterizing the use of Twitter by its many users. But first, a few disclaimers:

• Disclaimer 1: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. There is just not a lot of data available: just followers, uptakes, and followed for a given point in time. We collected this data around 4/29 or so.
• Disclaimer 2: Do not take this stuff too seriously or risk the charge of self-reflective narcissism. On the other hand, if you find this stuff interesting, then you are truly in the social media echo chamber!

Chart 1: Number of Followers by Twitterer

A small number of active Twitterers that have most of these followers. Here are a few statistics to illustrate this:

• The total count of followers in the entire list is 71,802. (Note: if 1 person follows 70 accounts, he would be counted 70 times in this number)
• JasonCalacanis, founder of Mahalo, has 22843 followers, or 32% of the total on the Twitterati T-List!
• The top 10 accounts have 79% of the followers.
• The top 20 accounts have 86% of the followers.

Leaderboard 1: Top 20 Twitterers by Followers

Excluding JasonCalacanis, here are the top 20 Twitterers as ranked by followers:

Twitter Name - Followers - URL

1. jakemarsh 13132 http://thejakemarsh.com/
2. bloggersblog 7741 http://www.bloggersblog.com/
3. musaaykac 4664 http://www.seotops.com/
4. tradingnothing 3173 http://www.tradingnothing.com/
5. jetblue 1844 http://www.jetblue.com/
6. jrosell 1315 http://www.sistemakiwi.com/
7. southwestair 880 http://www.southwest.com/
8. hostelcolonial 714 http://hostelbuenosaires.blogspot.com/
9. sheilas 673 http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Seafarer/
10. morrisey 663 http://www.blogdeviajes.com.ar/
11. travelrants 591 http://www.travel-rants.com/
12. shirleyjohn 582 http://livingthelifeofmydreams.blogspot.com/
13. elliottng 520 http://www.uptake.com/blog
14. Glennia 478 http://glenniacampbell.typepad.com/
15. chris2x 468 http://amateurtraveler.com/
16. parkylondon 396 http://www.thisweekinlondon.co.uk/
17. tarabrown 396 http://tarabrown.pbwiki.com/
18. leannecook 385 http://tripsforless.gop1d.com/
19. reckon 363 http://reckonwordwide.com/
20. everywheretrip 321 http://everything-everywhere.com/

Chart 2: Number of Updates by Twitterer

Updates are less skewed toward the top 10, and for the T-List Twitterati might be a better indication of who is active on Twitter and for how long.

Leaderboard 2: Top 20 Twitterers by Updates

1. sheilas 3715 http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Seafarer/
2. agcblog 2630 http://agcblog.wordpress.com/
3. mvdkooi 2588
4. morrisey 2430 http://www.blogdeviajes.com.ar/
5. hostelcolonial 2049 http://hostelbuenosaires.blogspot.com/
6. nerdseyeview 1877 http://www.nerdseyeview.com/
7. bloggersblog 1557 http://www.bloggersblog.com/
8. whiteraven13 1425
9. albertbarra 1378 http://www.albertbarra.com/
10. chris2x 1258 http://amateurtraveler.com/
11. parkylondon 1221 http://www.thisweekinlondon.co.uk/
12. Glennia 1220 http://glenniacampbell.typepad.com/
13. darrindickey 1195 http://blog.brandingfire.com/
14. reckon 1119 http://reckonwordwide.com/
15. everywheretrip 1087 http://everything-everywhere.com/
16. nyt_travel 1087 http://www.nytimes.com/travel
17. latimestravel 892 http://travel.latimes.com/
18. tarabrown 871 http://tarabrown.pbwiki.com/
19. akasylvia 869 http://backspace.blog.me.uk/
20. elliottng 809 http://www.uptake.com/blog

Twitter Noise Factor: Who is Tweeting the Most?

Last week, Louis Gray suggested a metric of Twitter Noise, as defined as a ratio of Updates/Followers. Cleverly named to generate buzz and interest, the Louis Gray metric was not actually designed to criticize those most “noisy” but to highlight that people use Twitter. No different for the T-List.

• Median Twitter Noise Factor is 1.63, or 1.6 updates per follower.
• Top 20 people are updating at a 12.5 Twitter Noise Factor, or about 7.6X times the median

Twitter Quotient

Sarah Perez of sarahintampa suggested another way to classify Twitter users and applied it to Louis’ original post. I did the Twitter Noise analysis for the China Twitterati, Louis also shared with me another tool called Twitter Quotient that also allows you to check your Twitter Noise quotient. Here’s mine:

Here’s the complete T-List Twitterati ranked by Followers:

UPDATE: note: if your URL is missing, add it to your Twitter account and leave a comment on this blog and I’ll add it!

TList Twitterati Member	Follwr	Upd/Flr	URL
jakemarsh	13132	0.03	http://thejakemarsh.com/
bloggersblog	7741	0.20	http://www.bloggersblog.com/
musaaykac	4664	0.01
tradingnothing	3173	0.08	http://www.tradingnothing.com/
jetblue	1844	0.06	http://www.jetblue.com/
jrosell	1315	0.33	http://www.sistemakiwi.com/
southwestair	880	0.21	http://www.southwest.com/
hostelcolonial	714	2.86	http://hostelbuenosaires.blogspot.com/
sheilas	673	5.52	http://blogs.bootsnall.com/Seafarer/
morrisey	663	3.66	http://www.blogdeviajes.com.ar/
travelrants	591	0.30	http://www.travel-rants.com/
shirleyjohn	582	0.07	http://livingthelifeofmydreams.blogspot.com/
elliottng	520	1.55	http://www.cnreviews.com
Glennia	478	2.55	http://glenniacampbell.typepad.com/
chris2x	468	2.68	http://amateurtraveler.com/
parkylondon	396	3.08	http://www.thisweekinlondon.co.uk/
tarabrown	396	2.19	http://tarabrown.pbwiki.com/
leannecook	385	0.15	http://tripsforless.gop1d.com/
reckon	363	3.08	http://reckonwordwide.com/
everywheretrip	321	3.38	http://everything-everywhere.com/
nyt_travel	321	3.38	http://www.nytimes.com/travel
despegar	315	0.75	http://www.blog.despegar.com/
agcblog	311	8.45	http://agcblog.wordpress.com/
traveladvice	305	0.19	http://www.shoppingblog.com/
soultravelers3	301	1.78	http://www.soultravelers3.com
hawaiiseo	291	1.27	http://hawaii-online-advertising.com/
beatricetarka	269	1.52	http://www.mobissimo.com/
albertbarra	250	5.51	http://www.albertbarra.com/
darrindickey	235	5.08	http://blog.brandingfire.com/
blogontravel	228	1.30	http://www.blogontravel.com/
deltaairlines	216	0.13	http://www.delta.com/
michelle_greer	209	2.43	http://onlinebusiness.volusion.com/
latimestravel	207	4.30	http://travel.latimes.com/
terminalacom	201	2.18	http://www.terminala.com/
akasylvia	197	4.41	http://backspace.blog.me.uk/
elliottdotorg	191	0.46	http://www.elliott.org/
lasseweb20	182	0.74	http://www.promocionweb20.com/
carnivalcruise	167	1.22	http://www.carnival.com/
atrapalo	165	1.8	http://www.atrapalo.com/
alew	163	3.3	0
philcaines	152	0.5	http://tourismtide.blogspot.com/
hjortur	142	2.8	http://blog.scope.is
stephenjoyce	139	2.2	http://www.stephen-joyce.com/
twblog	139	0.5	http://www.travelweekly.co.uk/blogs
hotelblogs	138	0.9	http://www.hotel-blogs.com/
happyhotelier