I am giving a presentation at the 2007 Adventure & Backpacker Industry Conference in Sydney next month and one of the session topics is beyond Web 2.0. This has got me thinking a lot about Web 3.0 for want of a better term.

While working on my presentation I realised that Web 2.0 from a marketing perspective is certainly well documented - but from an operational perspective there is still so much all businesses can do to capitalise on the new technologies of Web 2.0. The underpinning thought revolves around the use of data to make your business better. We recognise that marketing in the new Web is about giving your customers better access to information - real information, information they can use in the decision-making process. Whether that be reviews from fellow traveller, tag categorisation of items by other web users, your address loaded directly onto a Google map for useable direction or opinions directly from the company on a blog - the underlying concept being a better presentation of data and user generated data - in other words, not corporate marketing bullshit.

Yet in most business operations the idea of better use of information (data) based on leveraging Web 2.0 technologies is poorly executed. I won’t go into it here - but over the next two weeks as I flesh out my presentation I will keep you updated with snippets.

Anyway, this thinking about using Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS for faster information flow, open source solutions for company management and wikis and blogs for project collaboration has helped me clear up in my own head what I think the next-next web will be.

I have talked before with the guys here at Xebidy about the Web as an application. Indeed, I believe that the travel planner we are developing under our own steam is a small step toward this. It allows the user to traverse a website collecting items of interest on a scratch pad which they can then manipulate onto calendars, maps, social media such Facebook and through a raft of booking systems all using web services. The planner users multiple windows more akin to a desktop application and allows the user to manipulate the data through drag and drop to create their own information. This I believe is what real Web 3.0 will be.

If Web 2.0 is about users creating the content, Web 3.0 will be about users using the content to create their own information solutions. In Web 2.0 we refer to mash-ups as the creating of a new piece of functionality by combining two or more pieces of independent data - say mapping hostel locations onto a Google Map. But this functionality is inevitably created by your web developer - not your average web user.

In Web 3.0 I believe the user will be able to traverse the Internet at large collecting data as they go and combining into their own information architecture; a destination guide from Lonely Planet, Wake Up hostel in Sydney, Auckland Central backpackers in Auckland, combined with a Virgin Blue flight, stored on my Google Calendar and displayed on a multi-map map - information gathered from many independent sites and “mashed” together by the user to create their very own travel planner.

I am very interested in an MIT project called Piggy Bank, which is a plugin for the Firefox browser and is supposed to allow a user to gather data in exactly this way from a variety of websites (LinkedIn and Flickr in particular) and strip that data of presentation to be used in a new ways.

Wikipedia starts by referring to Web 3.0 as the Semantic Web - where content is associated with meaning not just text with tags. I see this as being a bit too philosophical - how about a definition of the “Web as an Application”

Next week a new website for Backpacking Queensland is due to go live and I think it is perhaps the most forward thinking “backpacking” website to come out in New Zealand and Australia (if not globally) with its’ reviews and ratings, inbounds RSS feed aggregation and tags. I have been honoured to be involved in this process from go to woe. Unfortunately, it only scrapes the surface of what is possible - but it is awesome nonetheless.

One of the key features of the new Backpacking Queensland site is the ability of users to tag the web pages as they go - and it is the reason for this post. That is, to explain some of the principals of tagging that are being applied to this project and to also layout further developments that should be undertaken in the future or applied to other projects that show the same willingness.

One of the most interesting posts I have ever seen on tagging was a comparison of Amazon and LibraryThing tags system by Tim Spalding
LibraryThing began on August 30, 2005 and instantly offered tagging. Three months later, Amazon introduced tags with much hype by Web 2.0 proponents. While tagging was becoming mainstream with sites like Del.icio.us, Amazon was huge and to many signalled the beginning of corporate sites adding tag functionality. But it never happened! In fact, currently LibraryThing has 10 times the tags as Amazon.

I have drawn a discussion list of what I think makes tags work:

1. Importance of critical mass

To do anything with tags you need lots of tags. In my article about What is Web 2.0 I introduce the concept of the Wisdom of Crowds. At it’s core is the recognition that the collective intelligence of the masses is captured for all to use, so classifications and therefore searches become richer, clearer and more satisfying.

Without a critical mass the effectiveness of tags are skewed by “opinion tags” - i.e. those like “good hostel” - there is even a risk that those items being tagged (in Backpacking Queenslands’ case the travel suppliers) corrupting the tags. There is obviously more questions than answers here (and it is unfortunate that I should have this as my first principle) such as how do we know when a page has aggregated sufficient tags to be tagged authoritatively? Or alternatively, what is the critical number of taggers a content item has to be exposed to, for meaningful tagging patterns to emerge

2. Tags are facilitating feature not simply just an add ons

Tagging should be easy and most importantly should be there for a purpose. In Backpacking Queensland a user can search important social media sites such as Flickr, You Tube, De.licio.us and Wikipedia for similar content with these tags. This is especially effective when we consider that travel decisions have one of the best fits for user generated content and peer reviews. Say, a user tags a page Brisbane and wants to see other traveller photos or videos of Brisbane to help make their travel plans they can easily retrieve these through the tagging of the pages on the Backpacking Queensland site.

Amazon has given little prominence to tags. Backpacking Queensland in contrast have put tags in the top right hand corner - one of the key positions for content. It is inevitable that there will always be conflict between commercial and basically “social” interests in most websites. On a retail site the most valuable space, where the reader’s eyes are first drawn, is most usually reserved for content that will generate the most revenue. Fortunately, Backpacking Queensland does not have a purely commercial interest, rather it is an information site driven by its’ members and therefore the tagging elements have been given pride of place which will hopefully gain wide usage and understanding.

Moreover, tagging is often used as a means of navigation, which on sites where there is good structured navigation this becomes less necessary and the tagging less effective. Consideration to the functionality of the tagging is essential. This could be an impediment to success on the Backpacking Queensland site as the navigation is well considered.

Building good quality search around tags (as we have done on the Backpacking Queensland website) is the first place to start. As one critic of Amazon says” I can use LibraryThing’s tags to find books I might like, to find others who have the same tastes in books I have, etc. It’ loads of fun, and it’s one of the things that makes LibraryThing so great. LibraryThing is much more user friendly with tags than Amazon is, so I tag everything in sight! LOL!”

3. Tagging is essentially a selfish act

Joshua Porter’s The del.icio.us lesson states that “personal value precedes network value,” or, rather the basic marketing rule of “what’s in it for me”. Users need an incentive to tag. The biggest being the need to organise for THEMSELVES a large collection of data. Users will not tag for the alturistic benefit of others. “Its’ as fun as straightening items at the supermarket. It’s not your stuff and it’s not your job” says Tim Spalding.

4. Yet tagging really kicks into gear when the personal blooms into social

When tagging content turns into an hours-long exploration of others’ web page categorisations tagging takes on a whole new level. Amazon (and unfortunately Backpacking Queensland) do not list their taggers. You need to click around a lot before the tags turn into people. (The failure is particularly surprising in light of Amazon’s clear grasp of social software. Amazon got “social” years before it was trendy.)

Tagging site should allow users to publish the lists of tags and equally other users to identify taggers with similar minds to see how they consider things. This particularly relevant in travel where recommendations and worth of mouth are important. If users feel like they are gaining something from the community (ideas on where to travel and so on) they will be more likely to feed the machine and tag themselves.

To dismiss people purely as selfish is wrong - look at the review sties where users go to great lengths to sing the praises of a product, or equally dismiss it. The answer can be found in usefulness - reviewers add reviews to a site if they themselves feel that the site is giving them good feedback. Users will tag a site if they feel that the tags are useful to themselves. Sites that send surveys as part of their customer review process should consider adding tag functionality at this stage.

So, there we have 4 principals of tagging: the importance of critical mass; the use of tags for a reason not because of a fad; the recognition that users tag pages for their own use not for the use of others; and that to make tagging really work a recognition that the personal agenda of individuals can be ratcheted into a social value. The Backpacking Queensland website goes live at the beginning of November and it will be interesting to see the tagging functionality take off and hopefully at some time in the future we may even get to develop it further, attach users to the tags, generate itineraries or other exported documents from the tags or even share the tags with other sites for integration - wouldn’t it be cool if the Calypso Hostel in Cairns listed their tags as seen on Backpacking Queensland on their own site!!

This has been around for ever - but it is still brilliant. For all us SEO geeks it is tres amusement. What if you got to build the Google home page? http://www.meangene.com/google/design_for_google.html

Another big announcement for us today! We have put the Wayward Bus Beta version of the website live today.

This is a cool site and includes amazing banner images by Chris Cooper. As I posted earlier when we released our new logo look, Christ has been working in the Xebidy studio doing some illustrations for the new Xebidy website - I know, I know - its’ coming (and so is Christmas)!

No amazing new features in this website yet, except for the inbound RSS feeds on the home and community page which are being fed via our XEFEED functionality and cleansed for relevancy.

Next step, travel planning, more community elements, fancy booking engine and so on.

We have finally got our Bootstrap demo up and running for all to play. It seems that whenever time was made to work on it something else would come up and we just did not have time. Nonetheless, here it is.

Feel free to login to the CMS and edit the content, create pages etc. The content is set to reload completely every hour.

Bootstrap is simply an interface change for the popular Silver Stripe content management server. The core of Silver Stripe is completely intact and Bootstrap can easily be added as a module. In fact, we are looking for developers wanting to get involved in helping us make it into a more off shelf open source module for all Silver Stripe users.

http://demo.xebidy.com

Well, its’ about bloody time some of you may say. But the first purely Xebidy designed website is live. The Park hostel in National Park.

This is one of the best hostels in New Zealand - evidenced by the blog stories we keep picking up. They might only be small guys but they certainly have an amazing product.

For this site we tried to bring the warmth of the atmosphere into the site - they have two huge open fires and being nestled in National park have stunning mountain views and a unique alpine feel. I have been lucky enough to have been there twice visits - once involving too many bourbons and an incredibly wrong decision not to jump into the spa pool with the Stray bus load of English girls after an eventful night in the National Park tavern - my wife is happy though.

Since then the guys have developed their own house bar and cafe which I am told is a roaring success for a chilled night in and a few quite ones (how many still end up in the spa, hmm?)

The unique things to look out for on this website are the inbound feeds from travel blogs around the Internet that feature The Park hostel. These travel stories are picked up by our Xebidy XEFEED product which is continually scanning all forms of social media including photo and video and video sharing sites, blogs, forums and review sites and feeding them back to a central server where we go through them sorting for relevancy and refeed these back to the website. Any criticisms or bad press can be picked up very quickly and sent through to management where they are immediately dealt with.

We also have a comments section on the site where guests are encouraged to leave their comments. We intend developing this further to produce a cool guestbook for reading of the comments - watch this space.

The site is built completely on our Bootstrap content management system (based on the awesome Silver Stripe open source platform) - which, if you have not heard about yet you must be in the dark ages! Have a look at Davis giving a seminar on it here.

Finally, we have linked the bookings part of the website to The Parks property management system, Starfleet. Our friends at Starfleet have integrated the booking engine so that it interrogates their database for availability and then populates with the booking - no need for endless double handling.

So, there you have it - a cool small site - lots of work to do on content to keep if fresh and happening but a site we are proud of as our first one purely designed and developed by Xebidy. We have retained a marketing contract with the guys at The Park and hope to do some really cool stuff over the next 12 months to get to the top of the search engines and lots of bookings!!

We talk a lot in onsite optimisation about the code to content ratio. The advent of CSS has meant that any code associated with styling the way the website looks, from the size of your font and headers to how the actual site is laid out, can be removed from the web page itself and held in a separate file. This has led increasingly to a belief that less code and more content on a web page will lead to better search engine rankings.

The reliance is therefore on the web developer to produce an optimised site - one that makes best use of CSS to remove inline styles from the web page etc. But, the job is half that of the developers - there is a huge responsibility of the website content manager too. A responsibility it would seem to me they are often unaware of.

Most of the sites I have seen in recent times are built on content management servers - it is pretty much the norm these days for good websites. But what this means is that the content managers enter their own content. No problem most are usually trained by their search engine marketing companies (or suss it out through their own research) on the importance of the keywords in the content etc. But what I have discovered recently is that very few have any regard for the tidiness of their content as code. Such examples that continually pop-up are the use of a break tag <br /> within a heading tag say <h1> - this serves no purpose, but to add code to the content without changing the look and feel. Similarly, a break before a closing paragraph tag - same effect, nothing! And the other one that is really painful is the excessive use of a non-breaking space ( ). Sometimes, they are necessary (such when adding paragraph for line spacing to make a particular page work in the content manager - but often they are not - and they only serve to increase the code to content ratio.

A little hint to avoid too many non-breaking spaces in your content: two spaces after a full stop in print documents; only one space after a full stop in web documents.

Much of this happens because content is copied and pasted either straight from one web page to another or directly from Microsoft Word. I advise all my clients when entering content that if they are not writing it from scratch straight into the content management servers themselves then paste the text into notepad first and convert the format it as plain text - which strips any formatting, before pasting it in.

So, BBC Worldwide (the commercial arm of BBC TV) has bought Lonely Planet, the Guide Book and websites. One of the guys in the office here just said “This is a good move for the BBC, but I liked Lonely Planet!” Ha ha; and hes’ English, he supposed to salute that bastion of English television and all thats good and impartial.

Seriously though is this really a good move? The answer is clearly yes. Many (me definitely being one) knock Lonely Planet books for the fact that by the time the book reaches print it is out of date and that the impartiality of the content is seriously questionable. I have been in the travel industry long enough to have spent time with a number of Lonely Planet writers and are therefore extremely skeptical of their impartiality.

However, the value is not to be found in the books outrightly but in the very strong website and TV presence. The Lonely Planet website is simply awesome. The Thorn Tree (the traveller forum section) has been very active since at least 2000/2001 when I can remember we were reading it for feedback on Kiwi Experience and Stray Travel, in fact we were quoting it on Stray Travel brochures by as early as 2001. The forum is not the only community based functionality on the site; travellers can submit their travel stories, review products, submit photos and so on. If you put forward the argument that the Internet has moved people away from the guidebook to getting peer to peer travel information and the like then the Lonely Planet website would certainly be one of the first stops on Web.

Late last year Lonely Planet also replaced their Hostel World booking engine with their own product, called Haystack. I have been meaning to write about this for some time, ever since in fact I was asked at the ATEC Forum if it would be successful. “Of course”, I said, “Lonely Planet was already one of Hostel Worlds’ largest affiliates so they already have the traffic.” The BBC announcement of the purchase confirms this - apparently they receive a staggering 4.3 million visitors per month. I hazard a guess that the Haystack booking site generates significant earnings to Lonely Planet.

I have only one critism of the Lonely Planet website (if you are listening Mr BBC) - why not make the book content available online? I understand that you are first and foremost in the business of selling books - but recognise that the value is in the data and even more traffic will be generated to the websites if it was possible not only to get peer information on the destination, but also so called professional information. Better still, why not put your guide book content on the web and turn it into a wiki. Let us contribute to the next publication!

Nonetheless Lonely Planet is in a envious position, while guide book sales may be dropping off, they have capitalised on the Internet and in particular the Web 2.0 generation with open arms and remain at the forefront of travel information both online and offline. Combined with their TV information, which I am sure will only be strengthened now with their new BBC ownership, the brand is surely destined to continue to dominate.

Finally, of course, as pointed out by our English mate, the web is all very well in places like Australia and New Zealand where an Internet terminal is never more than a stones throw away - but in places like South America and Africa the Lonely Planet will remain indispensable.