Vacations Blog

You may have seen Pam Mandel’s post on her blog about Blogher and our invitation to sponsor her attendance at the event and work with her to create a tightly knit travel blog community of some kind–yet to be defined…  It didn’t work out because Blogher was sold out by the time we had connected.

On to plan two…

I am still hoping to meet many travel bloggers at Blogher. Why? We would like to build a more connected community of travel bloggers for information sharing, ideas, and inspiration.  We think travel bloggers should be found more easily, there should be a means of connecting the related subjects and places discussed on all blogs and personally I could use a few tools to make it easier to include my fellow bloggers. Don’t you agree?

Here are few questions we would like to discuss at the travel meet-up:

1.  How can we build a travel blogger community in cooperation with all travel bloggers?  Great minds do think alike, right?

2.  What other communities do travel bloggers participate in that we could emulate? Does a tool or an application already exists that we can tap into for inspiration or improved communication?

3.  If we were to create a “travel blog meet-up” at other conferences, what kind of program would it be, would you attend, would you pay for it? Why or why not?

Pam sent me an email with her answers to these questions (thanks, Pam). We are hoping you too will respond and we can build this together:

How can we build more community for  travel bloggers?
Community building isn’t my expertise but I find that anything that encourages face to face meeting is good for the blog. I really have loved the travel bloggers I’ve met in 3D, really loved them.  Crazy, but true.

What other communities do travel bloggers participate in that we could emulate?
Boots n All and Lonely Planet have lively message boards. TripWolf is trying to create a Facebook type interactivity, but seems to be a real influx of social networking/travel sites on the market and I’m not clear on how to tell them apart.  I just reviewed My Life of Travel, another one with built in networking. Couch Surfing seems to me to be superior at getting the travelers together – I got my 20 year Austrian old niece on there and she can’t get enough of it. I recently spent some time explaining it to my folks. “You mean no money changes hands?” I’m a fan of the concept even while we don’t participate because my blogging connections keep a fairly steady rotation of travelers on our fold out.

Don’t overlook the expats. I got into blogging because I was an expat. It’s great informal community, the expat bloggers one. And Twitter -  I’m surprised to find myself saying how much I enjoy the 140 character conversations travelers are having on Twitter. I like it a lot and it’s put me in touch with folks I’d not have “met” otherwise.

If we were to create a travel blog meet up with other conferences, in a more organized fashion, what kind of program would they like, would they attend, would they pay for it? Other ideas…

1. I feel like many bloggers could wildly improve the readability of their blogs with some basic travel writing tips. My  .02 as someone who’s really wrapped up in writing.
2. “What’s in your travel kit?” is always a popular subject for bloggers who travel with their own technology.
3. Photography, of course.
4. Given the growing influence of blogs in the travel market, talking about ethics in travel blogging is an interesting, if contentious topic. Travel writers  want to take the high road when they’re faced with comped services, but at 10 bucks a post to blog about a destination, it’s hard to pay for your travels, much less make a living. Ethics on writing reviews, communicating with PR folks and travel providers, being transparent to your readers, etc… are all good topics for discussion.
5. Monetization, too, of course – can I make money writing a travel blog?
6. A lot of travel bloggers want to get off the blog into print and other media, how do they do that?
7. Finally, new media, pod casting, video… it’s really fun to work with other forms of blog communication.

Do you have suggestions, ideas or opinions about how to bring the travel community together and build some tools that work for us?  If so, email me, comment here, or meet at the meet-up.

Travel bloggers unite.

First of all congratulations to Yahoo! “Rebel Alliance” for taking this first step on what might be a disruptive move to compete against the Don’t-Be-Evil Empire! (h/t Dave McClure who coined this phrase). Now you will have to Use The Force and go much further to power an industry of distinctively unique Alternative Search Engines, like Uptake. (Disclosure: we are not using BOSS but plan to evaluate BOSS Custom for our use on providing backfill results)

BOSS: one of Yahoo!’s last hopes

Photo courtesy: Revell.de

But it took more than an X-Wing to destroy the Death Star. It Took the Force.

Here are the salient features of BOSS and where we think it has to go further to truly power innovative new search experiences.

Three levels, but only BOSS Custom has real potential for a highly differentiated service offering.

There are three levels to the BOSS program, according to SearchEngineWatch:

• self-service API
• BOSS University for academics
• BOSS Custom, designed for companies with their own ranking and/or presentation methodologies. Or alternative, companies with proprietary data that can help as an additional signal that factors into relevancy.

I’ll go over all the aspects of the BOSS program below, and then come back to BOSS Custom as evidence that Yahoo! just might Use The Force. But the basic features looks like a free version of Google Custom Search Engine.

Four primary functions of search are addressed by BOSS

TechCrunch highlights these 4 functions of search that BOSS provides as service:

This is a good framework. Lets start with indexing and crawling.

Crawling and Indexing: Not the real barrier to vertical search

According to Yahoo! Bill Michels, as reported by ReadWriteWeb, “niche search engines often aren’t very good because they have access to a very limited index of content. It’s expensive to index the whole web.” This is just wrong, in my opinion. It may be expensive but that isn’t why niche search engines haven’t been successful.

Lowering the cost of crawling can be good for startups, of course. However, with cloud services and vendors leveraging low cost computing and crawling, crawling is already becoming a commodity. In building Uptake, “buying the web wholesale” is the least of our worries especially because we are focused on one vertical.

We have used a stealth mode vendor to crawl the entire Web and build the most comprehensive structured database of travel products, at least 30% larger than any other source, and it didn’t take us $300 million to do that. According to SearchEngineLand, there is a vendor called CommonCrawl who aims to provide a complete index of the Web on a white label basis. So “buying the web wholesale” is possible today.

Building a repository of documents is only the beginning. The key is extracting meaning from the documents (and the relationships between the documents) to power your ranking algorithm.

Ranking: Some new ability, but still built on top of a black box

Building a ranking model for a specific purpose is probably the most difficult task for a search startup. BOSS can help jumpstart a new companies effort by providing an acceptable but not differentiated result.

Ranking: Add your own search signals so you can re-rank results

Proprietary signals are needed to deliver better precision through better ranking matched against user intent for any given query. BOSS breaks new ground by allowing you to add and blend your own search signals into Yahoo!’s black box. Example from SearchEngineLand:

Me.dium is the example highlighted by Yahoo! Silicon Alley Insider points out that Me.dium is adding social signals to Yahoo! ranking and calling it “Social Search” which ironically is “using a name Yahoo! has already attached to a failed product.” VentureBeat has a more positive spin on the Me.dium demo application, although Dan Kaplan concludes:

The question that hangs over Yahoo, BOSS, and Me.dium is whether or not any search player will really be able to change user behavior and get people to consistently use something other than Google; the results would probably have to be a noticeable leap forward, and even then, it would be hard to break Googling habits.

Dan is absolutely right, and BOSS will have to go a lot further to deliver a true “leap forward.”

Ability to blend results:

In addition to re-ranking, Yahoo! BOSS also allows you to blend results. This has potential for much more interesting SERPs that are more tailored for a specific vertical or search intent state.

Blend: Mashup Framework

As an added plus, Yahoo! is providing the BOSS Mashup Framework. According to Yahoo! Search Blog: “We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data source”

Blend: Web, news, and image search availability at launch

This seems like table stakes. Vanessa Fox at SearchEngineLand points out that at first glance, the API looks similar to Google custom search API and Microsoft’s Live Search API

Query handling

This is also a big challenge for new search startups. Yahoo!’s service provides for this as part of the overall service. But as far as I can tell there is no way to insert one’s own query parsing into Yahoo!’s so as to affect the search results. UPDATE from Huanjin Chen: I guess a developer can always use his/her own GUI to get the user query and parse it and then form a Yahoo query. If so, the developer can insert his/her own query handling.

Presentation: Total flexibility on presentation

According to Yahoo! Search Blog: “Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements” This means no attribution required! But this is a red herring because…

Business Model: Advertising strings attached

According to GigaOm, you have to use Yahoo! Search Advertising. And Om makes the point:

Notably, they are asking startups to sign up for their search monetization system — the very same system that is going to use Google to drum up ads. That isn’t a very confidence-inspiring move. And if this monetization tool was so great, Yahoo wouldn’t be in the kind of trouble it’s in.

Indexing of the Semantic Web not included.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb asked if the indexing of the semantic web would be included, and they said not. But this is no big deal because semantic tags and microformats have yet to be adopted in a huge way by the most important sites, who would rather focus on traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Google rather than use immature tools to expose semantic meaning.

Business Model: Unlimited queries

Business model friendly pricing, although you have to sign up for their advertising platform.

BOSS Custom: Now you’re talking about Using The Force

Everything above was just for the Jedi Apprentice. But if you are going to confront the Dark Side, you need BOSS Custom. Here’s what they provide and why it is critical (and may or may not be far enough):

Near real-time indexing of public or proprietary content

Real-time indexing is appropriate for time-sensitive information like news and blogs. This could be an advantage over other wholesale crawling and indexing methods that other private label providers are providing.

Blending training datasets to produce advanced, customized ranking models that scale to the Web

This is probably one of the most interesting aspects of BOSS custom. This suggests that a training dataset and our own proprietary signals can be integrated into the Yahoo!’s existing ranking models. So the real question is: how much of that ranking model will be opened up for tuning by the search startup?

Federating web and proprietary content in a single search display

This can already be achieved using Google Custom Search Engine in a rudimentary way. The larger issue is that most proprietary content in structured databases are not just unstructured (or semi-structured) Web documents but more structured database objects with attributes. How does BOSS Custom make it easy to integrated the right Web pages with the right products, without really understanding what entities are on those Web pages?

Integrating query suggestions (Search Assist technology)

Query parsing services is one of the most interesting aspects of BOSS Custom. Search Assist is very well done already, and if it could be integrated with our custom, industry-specific ontology.

Leveraging highly trained query and document categorizers

Also very interesting, if indeed this is being opened up to developers. Our own query categorizers are still fairly early stage and if we could understand Yahoo!’s query categorizers work and could integrated our own understanding of natural language into that categorizer, this could be a real accelerator for us in parsing queries better.

Structured search (range queries, refinement)

This sounds interesting, but I’m sceptical that the horizontal approach to refinement will provide for a truly differentiated experience unless the specific needs of that customer, as captured in an ontology, can be integrated into the refinement controls provided for by BOSS Custom.

UPDATE: Here are some additional thoughts from our China search team and Huanjin Chen, our search architect:

Structured search and query/document categorizers can be useful tools for driving improved relevance for niche search engines. There are many ways of making search results more relevant. One is to understand the user intention better and refine the search, which structured search addresses. Another way is to build the ontology/taxonomy/directory to classify queries and documents, which can benefit from the categorizer.

Unlimited queries are essential to build a commercial search engine. Google search API might be more structured and flexible than Yahoo’s, but they only allow 50K queries per day. Potentially, a search engine could use both. One could build ontology using Google’s search API, and then use Yahoo BOSS for user search results.

Yahoo also does not allow access to their ranking signals. Agreed, this is a huge limitation, but it is understandable. The Yahoo ranking order is still useful. At minimum, one could use it as one of the relevance factors. If one can query Yahoo search engine in different ways, then one can kind of guess their ranking signals. The drawback is that multiple queries may be a performance concern.

Crawling is not a barrier to vertical search engine. It is true. However, first, it still makes an under-funded startup to get start easily; second, Yahoo data helps on time-sensitive data; third, some startups may want to try semi-horizontal market, such as content for kids and shopping, which is more costly to crawl.

New search startups have to take a different approach to differentiate from Google and Yahoo! How will BOSS support this?

Huanjin: In general, I think this is a very important event for all search startups. It opens new opportunities. Google has pushed search relevance to the limit that the current approach can achieve. To significantly improve the search relevance, we have to take drastically different approaches, i.e., not solely by keyword matching, not solely by statistical signals, and not treating every user the same. My take on the direction of search technology is

(1) Meaning based (semantic and/or syntactic).

(2) Context aware. The same word means different things in different contexts.

(3) Must be able to treat different users differently

(4) Opinion based.

(5) Leverage human knowledge base

The BOSS Custom roadmap needs to envision supporting these innovative approaches, because that is the only way that new startups can create a reason for people to leave their horizontal search engine like Google and adopt an alternative.

UPDATE:  Andrew Chen’s take is totally on target

Andrew Chen makes the point that Yahoo! BOSS just allows search mashups, and what Yahoo! really needs to do is open up their search and network traffic:

Andrew:  “The extreme approach – well not even that extreme these days, given Facebook – would be to let developers build extensions to the search engine that actually run on top of the *.yahoo.com domain. They can provide an API, do app approvals, and direct only small bits of traffic to each app to test them out – then ramp up the ones that perform better than anything else. There are difficult pieces necessary to make this work, but if done well, it has the potential to change the search game by letting developers target small groups of queries the way that advertisers have been able to.”

But when Marshall Kirkpatrick asked about this, Yahoo! responded “oh, that’s a different department.”  Will Yahoo! bring their disparate fiefdoms together into one integrated strategy to truly Use the Force?!

And much, much more…

This will be interesting. BOSS and BOSS Custom is a bold, dynamic approach to the ever-increasing hegemony of the Don’t Be Evil Empire! Competition is good and we wish Yahoo! the best of luck. Our advice is to Use The Force and go far enough to equip players like us to create highly differentiated experiences from general search.

Death Star here we come!

Source: Wikipedia

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!