Wikia, a company founded by Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) has launched a new effort called World Wikia, which aims to create an editable worldwide guide of places to go and things to do. The company wants to leverage the expertise of the locals to build better travel resources than what is out there.
There is a lot of things I like about this service, such as that all the content is available under GDFL. Still, like most companies that plan to make money off the “user generated content,” Wikia doesn’t clearly say how it is going to share the profits with those who are writing the wikias! The commerce-community conundrum continues.
Wikia still has ways to be called user friendly! 43Things and 43Places are much easier to use. Photos and real world testimonials that are updated daily are easy to consume. Those two resources are more organic, and feel alive compared to other travel resources including Wikia. See it for yourself: Vancouver, one of my favorite cities on 43Places versus Wikia.
Fair disclosure – I work for Wikia (http://www.wikia.com).
Om, as always, has some valid points… but I want to show that while Om has some valid points there is a bit more to the story.
On the content side – we’re just starting up our world travel pages (http://world.wikia.com) so of course some areas will have more depth than others, but the beautiful thing about wikis is that they grow. For instance, there’s already a ton of content about the churches of Rome at http://romanchurches.wikia.com (romanchurches dot wikia dot com). From this example, I think you can see that this is going to be so much more than your normal “go here, see that” travel guide.
As for the presentation of the information, our format tends to be cleaner for the reader. Since we’re using the same software as Wikipedia, we think a lot of readers will agree (or at least be very familiar with it already). Granted, editing can be a little bit interesting… we’re working on making that easier but on the plus side if you’ve ever contributed to Wikipedia, we have all the same powerful tools available.
Thanks,
John Q.
All of these travel and place oriented websites are missing the boat completely. You need maps. Maps are the most tried-and-true, straightforward way to define the relationship between all these places you want users to visit. So why are sites like 43 Places not including maps as a primary user interface? And Wikia doesn’t even have a mapping interface (that I could find). How could this be overlooked?
43 Places now has mapping. I’ve pretty much decided to use 43P as the place to host my geo-related info. They’ll take care of the nasty geo bits for me.
And Om: guess we have to make some more reasons for you to come to Vancouver. Maybe NV 07? I think we’re going to have a large geo/mapping component…it’s just about time to introduce those concepts to the more average users.
For all of these sites, it’s about attracting users. I feel more comfortable sinking my time into 43P, which already integrates with other services like Flickr and Upcoming, than Wikia.
Oh, right, and the secret second part: whoever does SEO the best wins.
Boris,
if i had my way, i would live in vancouver. give me an excuse and i am there.
on the 43Places, I agree with you about its flexblity. i am sorry but the wikia is not ready for me as yet. that doesn’t mean it won’t be. I am pretty confident that they will.
best
Fair disclosure: I work for TripAdvisor.
When you talk about user generated content in the travel category, I can’t help but remind people that back in the Web 1.0 days (2000), TripAdvisor launched with the idea of harnessing all that collective knowledge.
Some think we’re stil Web 1.0 (http://fabricoffolly.blogspot.com/2006/04/tripadvisor-or-how-web-10-can-still-be.html), but I think they’re missing a few new features.
Recently TripAdvisor added wiki functionality with the launch of TripAdvisor Inside pages earlier this year for each of our 24,000 destinations. New contributions are made every day, growing into a dynamic online guidebook.
Users also post photos of their trips on TripAdvisor, and we link to maps and more.
Since Vancouver was mentioned earlier, I pasted a link to that destination’s pages below — a good example of the variety of information on the site, including forums for community exchange.
http://www.tripadvisor.com/Tourism-g154943-VancouverBritishColumbia-Vacations.html
Brian Payea
TripAdvisor
Ok, what is The Next after Web 2.0 ?
If Web 2.0 is syndicating, sharing and taking the internet to its elementary pieces, then the Next is applying activates between the elements of Web 2.0.
If Content in Web 2.0 is an elementary piece, then the Next elementary piece is the relations per se, which are combined in the content, between such contents and which are linked by/via/to it.
Imagine peers having their private “knowledge base” on each of their machines. Imagine each of the peers employs each other’s machines, but contrary to grid computing or distributed computing, they do so in short pulses and in a developed reaction, in which each of the peers forms and not only performs the tasks, while earning and ranking the trust of the others.
If sharing in Web 2.0 is exercised by delivery of contents, then another scale of processing the information is opened up for such communities.
For more about this concept, please visit my site.