RSS FeedEvery good and not so good website these days needs to have social networking functionality. From LinkedIn to Naymz and YouTube to MySpace, we are being encouraged, nagged and bullied into participating in an ever-widening array of networking opportunities. The internet gives people who are addicted to people a helping hand.
No more so than in travel, it appears. Travellerspoint, Travelmole, Travelistic, Trip Tie; Trip Up; 43 Places, Trip Hub, Where are you now (WAYN), Trip Connect, Dopplr, TripIt, Driftr. Add your own favourite, the list isn’t exhaustive. And this is before the hotels and holidays rating services being used by online travel agents and some travel meta-search engines.
TripAdvisor is owned by Expedia, for example, and Trip Up was acquired in July 2007 by SideStep. So what is it about these sites that appeals so much that these serious businesses are willing to spend serious money?
My first response to Web 2.0 functionality is (typically) one of cynicism. The cynic in me says that users are either people with too much time on their hands; or are not users at all, but were arm-twisted into signing up to something that then gains little or fleeting participation from them. There’s also the suspicion that the value of many social networking sites is disproportionately borne by the readers of material, rather than the writers of it. For instance if I give a poor rating for a lousy business hotel, I get little more than a momentary diminution of stress – while the reader of my rant avoids the hotel in question, a much larger gain. Continue »
Climate change is big news everywhere. Most scientists agree that change is happening and that the human race is the cause. Admittedly there’s confusion about what change really means. When the icecaps melt, it is global warming; but hotter summers or wide-spread flooding equals climate change. Go figure.
