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”

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.

I am so sorry that there has been no posts for some time - since we put the Bootstrap video up with have been inundating with enquiries and feedback. We are finalising the demo site and expect it any day now! Plus, I have only just graduated from the couch to the kitchen table with this broken ankle.

In the meantime, I have some cool news to report. We have been so busy here at Xebidy developing all our new stuff (Breathe website, Backpacking Queensland website, new functionality for Base Backpacker, and Wayward Bus and The Park websites getting close to going live) that we simply did not have time to do the designs for the new Oz Experience website. Anyway, a local company here in Queenstown called Fluid Designs was commissioned to do the designs - and they have come back with three awesome options. So much so in fact that we can’t decide which direction to go in next.

The solution: Bruce Thurlow at Oz Experience has asked the Oz Experience groups in Facebook for their opinion. I think this is awesome - after all these are the same customers that use and enjoy the product - they know the product better then the company themselves. Lets’ hope we get some constructive feedback.

Whats’ more, by empowering the customers he has created a bit of an aire of anticipation too. Once we get the feedback the plan is to report to the group and keep them in the loop, announce new functionality and generally spread he word. This sort of social marketing really gets me excited!!

I have written two earlier posts regarding Base Backpackers and their courageous move allowing Hostel World reviews and ratings to appear on their website unedited. But today a thought…

Clearly, the use of this independent user generated content signals a tick of recognition by Base of the dominant position of Hostel World in the online hostel booking space but does it also mean an erosion of the Base brand online? Is this in effect saying to a customer book with Hostel World and not us?

When we originally designed the Base web strategy the majority of Base hostels were using the Hostel World property management system Backpack for Windows which meant that every customer that booked online at both the Hostel World website and the Base website were sent an online survey. Unfortunately, in the last 6 months many of the hostels have switched systems and this is no longer the case. So, I guess the answer will come over the next few months. If Hostel World can maintain the necessary level of content to make this functionality work for Base then Hostel Worlds’ position as the dominant independent source for traveller reviews and ratings will be confirmed - if not, perhaps Base will be forced to look elsewhere.

As an aside, the whole displaying of these reviews and ratings on the Base website developed by Xebidy is pretty flash - well we thought so anyway! We use a variety of products to continually monitor the relevant Hostel World pages, pick up the content, strip it of any presentation and represent it on the Base website in valid HTML. Since making it public I have been advised that Hostel World are going to RSS feed that content in the next 4 to 6 weeks. This is a great move by them, firstly it stops uncontrolled hits on the server by guys like us, and secondly it will make the content widely available for use by everyone - and maybe this is the answer to the dominance of the Hostel World brand online.

Interestingly enough it also means that those wanting to display only good comments could use products such as our Xefeed RSS feed rinse to remove bad comments - not quite what everyone had in mind I am sure!

There has been a huge amount of focus lately here in the office on what we actually do as part of our SEO process as we have been putting together manuals for our clients and for ourselves internally. We know we are bloody good at it - but we are finding the exact documentation of the process about as laborious as the process itself.

Anyway, this explains the more than normal amount of SEO posts in the last few weeks or so. Today’s post again covers on-site optimisation relative to your competitors. Here’s 12 steps I think are imperative in checking out your competitors.

1. Establish the top 10 sites in the search engine results for your keywords;
2. Compare the web page titles of these sites relative to your own for the quantity, density, position, number of words and number of characters.
3. And then compare the meta data (keywords and description) for the same features - quantity, density, position, number of characters and words
4. Look at the body text of your site against you main competitors. Analyse the first 50 words once again for quantity, density, position, number of words and characters. Also, look at the first and last sentence of the body texts. Look for words that are bold or underlined.
5. Look at in-site links, the URLs they go to, and the anchor text used in the links. Also look for keywords in the alt text and title text of the links. Check the number of times that the title text link tag is used over the plain link ref - we believe it should be no more than 6 times - but check what your competitors are doing.
6. Compare outbound links; the content of the link and where they are going.
7. Compare the physical URLs you are competing with
8. Compare the heading tags throughout the sites using the same categories of density, position, number of words and characters
9. Look at all the alt text on the images on each site
10. Count the number of words on each page (in an earlier post I discussed that top ranked sites seem to have been 500 and 700 words)
11. Establish the theme of yours and your competitors websites, that is, consider all your web page titles together to see which keywords make up the majority of your text
12. And, finally look at the general page properties. These are the HTML size, look for same colour text and background, tiny text, immediate keyword repeats, whether the sites use controls or frames, and the use of internal and external javascript. Here you are looking more that your site is doing the right things.

We have said it many times, no one really knows the construct of search engine algorithms in terms of the weighting given to links, heading tags etc. One of the axioms of on-site optimisation relative to your competitors is that if you at least equal your competitors (for search engine rankings) in terms of all the above then you are at least competing on an even playing field in terms of onsite optimisation.

I spent the day yesterday with my mates at Base Backpackers finalising the go-live beta version of their new website as well as looking to the next few months advancement of the site. Xebidy did not design the site but we developed it onto our Bootstrap content management server which is based on the Open Source Silver Stripe CMS. The most exciting is probably the next 12 months however when Xebidy will be working with the guys at Base to develop the functionality into a new world with lots of great Web 2.0 features planned - I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag just yet; and also the implementation of an extensive Internet marketing plan that was authored by Jonathan Dixon at Xebidy.

One of the cool things about this project is the courageousness of management and foresight with respect to this project. A few weeks ago I posted about a real world web 2.0 dilemma we were facing on the project; in which we are taking automatic feeds of reviews and ratings from the independent Hostel World website and displaying them directly on the Base website. As I said while the reviews were not really that bad - there were reviews that you might not want to display on your home page necessarily. Nonetheless, it was decided that these reviews would be displayed regardless, unedited.

Base understands the importance of word of mouth and that in order to compete and achieve their objectives of being the best hostel/budget accommodation in Australia and New Zealand they simply have to provide the best possible product. A message has been sent out from head office to all hostel managers that the reviews and ratings will be considered as a measurement of success and that managers should strive to improve their ratings and address reviews head-on. Further a policy has been put in place to address any negative comments head on so that they are either turned into a positive or more importantly that the issue is taken on board, that if possible they are rectified and that the users are communicated that this has been done.

It will be great to monitor the reviews and ratings over the next 12 months and see what impact this positive attitude has. I am easily betting that all the Base hostels ratings will improve by at least 5 -10% (which is a lot when you consider they are already consistently the top rating hostels in their cities) over the next 12 months through both a positive influence on the ratings and review medium and also through increased focus of the manager directly on the feedback from their customers.

It’s going to be a great 12 months and I will keep you informed as we introduce some of the new functionality and rework the site - taking it from the soft beta launch it is today to the full functionality user-centric site that is planned.

Following my post earlier this week re thinking about Web 2.0 in terms of your customers as opposed to your competitors an interesting follow up note relates to identifying your target market and therefore the Web 2.0 technologies that might appeal. Perhaps these 5 steps might be applicable:

1. Identify the nationalities and age of your ideal customers;
2. Answer “what are the key fears customers have about using your products”;
3. Decide on the key message to your ideal customer - alleviate their fears and appeal to their senses;
4. Decide on the image or perception to attract the ideal customer; and
5. Review peer websites in your ideal market and their style

An interesting task came across my desk today; “We want to know what are competition are doing that is Web 2.0″. Unfortunately, this is completely the wrong attitude to take.

I am assuming that by Web 2.0, the person asking the question means what are my competitors doing with many of the social technologies of the new collaborative Internet (see my article on What is Web 2.0 for more explanation) - which is still the wrong question! Businesses should not view mediums such as Blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, podcasts and so on, not as technologies that will necessarily accelerate the sales process but rather as the tools that will improve communications and increasing engagement with your customers.

The question therefore, should relate to the customer; “I target the luxury market (or backpackers etc.) - what do they expect from our businesses website in terms of Web 2.0?” Different customers are demanding different information and methods of receiving it - the younger market is more in tune with blogs and forums, other markets are well versed in RSS feeds (it is now standard practice with newspaper feeds and the like), and female travellers are more likely to use social networks such Facebook and MySpace. Obviously, there is enormous market and technology crossover, but most importantly, the focus should not be on the competitor but on the customer themselves and on how your business communicates with them to create the best possible relationship.

User-generated content is certainly a revolution and those that are harnessing its’ power are winning the web game to attract customers. But are they?

I am involved in a very interesting project with Base Backpackers that has somewhat run aground. I first proposed the use of inbound RSS feeds from blogs etc as a means of building up independent content about the 11 hostels across Australia and New Zealand, however, following a strategy session in Sydney it was decided to take a gigantic leap of faith in the product and take comments about the hostels directly from Hostelworld.com (the largest online booking website for hostels and backpackers with many many user reviews). Of course, I was right into the idea - an awesome real Web 2.0 initiative. The decision in the strategy sessions were that Base Backpackers was focusing on delivering a superior product and therefore this was very much firstly about facilitating the flow of information between customers to spread the word that Base Backpackers hostels were good; and secondly about setting transparent checks and balances for hostel managers to strive to.

All sounded good those days in March when the plan was hatched. However, as we moved toward going live on Friday we struck a huge snag - comments are not as appealing as it was hoped. In the majority they are not that bad - but there are those that are simply not complimentary. Surprisingly, the one that has caused the most problems is kind of completely left-field, encouraging customer to stay there if they want sex (in a few other words) - not really a complaint against the hostel but certainly not something you want displayed on the front page of the website.

We have not really been involved in the design of the website only the execution and now it is crunch time in the project. The plan is to make the Hostelworld reviews appear on the site automatically, but at present we are simply taking them to text file and then manually putting them onto the site at regular intervals. The most recent comment is displayed as a leader on each hostel home page, which then links to the other comments. We also take the ratings of each hostel from Hostel World and display these on the website. Once we automate the process the ability to edit is completely removed.

So, now in going live the questions are overarching - do we intervene and only show positive comments on the home page as the leader to all the comments? Or, do we go a step further and delete all the negative unwarranted comments from the site completely?

The theory of Web 2.0 is that the masses generate a collective intelligence, that a bad review is outweighed by good reviews (that is, if the product is good) and that one off reviews such as the review posing problems for Base Backpackers are immediately seen through by the customers. All good and well, and you know that I am a huge promoter of this, but what if there is simply not enough comments to generate the critical mass of collective intelligence? Moreover, what about travellers on long travel time frames, such as Backpackers - also tight on a budget; are they not less likely to take the time to write in a good review? Things were fine, thank-you very much, stayed for a few days, moved on - can’t really be bother filling in the online survey, reviews and ratings form.

So there you go - a real world Web 2.0 conundrum!

In driving into the office this (Sunday) morning, I was listening to an interesting article on Radio New Zealand. It involved leading members of the media discussing the demise of newspaper and television news consumption. Part of this panel was also a guy from Scoop - New Zealand’s leading online news agency (I am sorry I joined the article late so did not hear names).

The thing that interested me was just how much these guys did not get it. The interviewer kept pushing a point that the public had lost interest in news and were therefore consuming less. There was a lot of discussion around how consumers are choosing to consume their media at different times (i.e. at work via the Internet) but absolutely no discussion about consumers are demand “pull” media, as opposed to “push”.

We have discussed this before in length in my articles explaining how consumers are choosing what they receive as news and when they receive. Instead on waiting to fed the news on TV at 6pm or in the morning paper, technologies such as RSS feeds and social book-marking websites allow consumers to choose the news articles they are interesting in (or in the case of social bookmark sites such as Digg.com and Del.icio.us what the general masses consider to be relevant) and to choose when and how they consume them. For example, I have a number of different RSS feeds for my news (everything from CNN, Sky, BBC, New York Times, and NZ Herald) and I will regularly read about the same incident from two or three of these feeds getting a different slant on the news and making my own, what I perceive to be, “real truth” conclusions.

In fact, I think this is the point that these guys were missing in this radio article: the consumers appetite for news has increased exponentially, along with consumers distrust on the impartiality of mainstream news reports. The ease of these “web 2.0″ technologies has mean’t that consumers can create their own news, receiving information on topics they are interested in, and filtering out the political or other spin on the news. In my recent article on “What is Web 2.0?” I gave two examples of a more pertinent form of journalism, known as “citizen journalism”. In the UK The Sun newspaper now provides a single mobile phone number for the public to submit copy and photos, and in South Korea the OhmyNews service has over 50 journalists editing content regularly received from 40,000 citizen journalists. A fundamental
shift in people’s perception of who has the authority to ‘say’ and ‘know’ underpins the Web 2.0 ethos.

One of the points made is the growth in consumption in these off line medias (newspapers and TV) of faux journalism - by this they mean lifestyle information etc in your Sunday papers. One commentator suggested this was because consumers were sick of the news. Quite the opposite, in our daily routine we are happy to consume much more news, rather it is because reading the lifestyle section of your Sunday paper is a form of escapism from the rigours of the week of business and work. Unfortunately, by the time Saturday or Sunday, or for that matter 6pm on a weekday when TV news is on, there is no news current enough for our appetite. There is no news that we have not already digested through our computers throughout the day. An interesting term is media snacking; taking snippets of information from a multitude of media in order to consume more information earlier and faster. these snippets might be coming from our RSS feed readers, online news sites, traditional news media, and increasingly media sharing sites such as You Tube and Flickr.

So, are newspapers and TV newspapers dead? In their current format I think so. In was interesting that the section of the article that I listened to the guys from Scoop did not speak too much rather just confirming many of the statements, such as a noticeable increase in traffic at 10am and 6:30pm. It is clear that those media outlets that recognise the insatiable appetite for fast unfiltered news will be the winner.