Texplora

Offbeat Guides

Offbeat Guides is very close to our own research. it is actually a travelguide which the user can put together from existing templates. The final product can either be ordered as a pdf or as a bound booklet.

The chapter overview interface of Offbeat Guides. Once a destination and travel date are chosen, the site compiles a contents page with several chapters which the user can turn on and off.

The main interface is a simple five-step wizard. First one has to type in name, destination and travel dates and then the site generates a list of articles or chapters relating to the chosen destination. Those chapters contain the usual stuff such as sightseeing, food, history, events, etc… The user turn individual articles on and of via mouse click. There is also the possibility to add custom chapters.

One can imagine how this could develop into an elaborate tool with sophisticated handles for the user to customise his travel guide. At the moment though the result seems rather dissappointing. The texts are all bog standard and the customisation is mainly about eliminating unwanted information. No idea why this is called “offbeat”. There seems to be no information that wouldn’t be found in any other guide, at least not for the destinations that I tried out. This is even more astonishing as the concept behind the information draws from the web and individuals on site:

Our content is the most up-to-date because we have an enormous technology base of spiders and crawlers that find the best information out on the internet, and combine it with information from established authors and thousands of locals who are always updating the information about where they live. We also believe strongly in Creative Commons, in which users can share, create and build information that is available for mixing and remixing into unique new applications.

Maybe the problem is that this is still a beta and the network of individuals supporting it yet not big enough. The question is, whether this will ever reach the critical mass to function properly. Another problem is the quality of their semantics. Why the event page for Lucerne comes up with a football match between Oberhausen and Freiburg, played in a stadium a few hundred kilometers away is a conundrum. The listing of the EUCHEM Conference on Stereochemestry amongst the events is similar puzzling. With a price of about 25 dollar one would expect some high quality standard. This is simply not worth the money. However, the basic concept - creative commons material, collaborative authoring, customisation, data mining  -  seems to go into the right direction.

The Pdf version of the Offbeat Guide

Nileguide

Nileguide is very similar to Tripwolf which was discussed in an earlier post in that it offers a customised tour guide that can be downloaded as a pdf. Similar as with Tripwolf I did not find a way to get it printed as a book which would be a really nice feature. The generation of content also works similar  as in Tripwolf: There is a database which rather fixed content from which the user chooses his items. Or in other words, the whole database makes up a full guide book and the user decides which parts of the guide book he wants. The actual interaction when assembling the guide though is different than in Tripwolf. While the latter allows one to drag and drop arcticles, Nileguide just lets one tick boxes. There is drag-and-drop though when it comes to organising the trip (see image).

This is the part of the nileguide interface that lets you organise the trip. Venues, sights and attractions can be added to a specific date through drag and drop. These drag-and-drop items contain preprepared articles about the specific object.

The general problem with these kind of tour guides (Nileguide and Tripwolf) is that the information seems rather generic. The local and expert know how seems to flow into the hotel recommendation process but not into the writing of the guide book articles. 

GetJealous.com

GetJealous.com is actually not a travel planning website but an online travel diary. It provides travellers with webspace to post blog entries, movies, images and also a map with the destinations and a message board for friends to leave notes. This is a very plain and straight forward solution with no real networking aspects. A downside might be the fact that people already post images, movies, etc… on different platforms and might not want to have a different account for their travel blog.         

the main interface of getjealous.com. The different content sections are navigated via tabs on the top.

I think it is also important to look at a few exisiting examples of online travel literature. There is actually quite a lot of stuff out there that does allow the user to interactively put together travel information and even to export it into a pdf. In the following article I will give an overview:

TRIPWOLF

The main column of the tripwolf travel guide

 
Tripwolf is a social network around travelling. At the core is a guide which gives insider information about destinations but there is also the possibility to post images in a gallery, to book hotel rooms and to write travel blogs. The networking aspect is quite interesting as this is a platform for individual travellers. Therefore people can actually meet fellow travellers online. Once you sign on, Tripwolf actually allocates you what they call a trip guru, who sends you a friendship request and thus supposedly supports you. Not exactly sure but I could imagine that those “gurus” get payed by Tripwolf or maybe just like in other platforms this is all about status. This means that supporting other users somehow hightens a user’s status on the platform - there is actually such a thing as a top trip guru - and that some users simply compete via this ranking.

The scrapbook of the Tripwolf website

The most interesting thing with regards to our project is probably the so called scrap book in the side bar. The scrap book allows one to drag and drop information about venues from the main middle column and to collect them there. Later those information can be exported into a pdf file and printed out on paper. Thus one can turn the digital information into an analogue leaflet.
However I find this leaflet rather disappointing. In my case I have chosen Vienna as a destination. Thus the first few pages give me a very rough overview over vienna which is more or less a collection of addresses of all kinds of hotspots (culture, sport, nightlife, hotels, etc…). I had manually added the Stefansdom as one of the attractions I wanted to visit which shows on the guide as a single page with a few images and a few lines of text.
Besides the rather meak content the process of putting together the trip via the scrapbook is rather clumsy I find. I would prefer a layout preview which shows me all the content and lets me add and delete information.
As it is I would  rather buy myself a proper guidebook than using this as an analogue tool for getting around my destination.

An excerpt from the pdf that can be exported via Tripwolf's scrapbook

GOPLANIT

Whilst TripWolf concentrates on aspects of social networking, GoPlanit’s focus is more on the  integration of various Web2.0 applications and they do this quite cleverly: The planning of a trip in this case is around itinerarys and accordingly one starts with a calendar overview. One has the choice to either add activities individually to this calendar or to go for an instant predefined itinerary (as this is a beta this can currently only be done with a few destinations mainly in the US). However, any kind of items can be deleted, edited or added to and from the itinerary.

An instant itinerary of a trip to New York generated by the GoPlannit website. Items can be added, edited and deleted.

There is also a very smart mash-up with Google Calendars mapping all events, hotels, venues etc… of the itinerary onto the map of the City/area that one intends to visit. But what I think could be the killer application is the iCal integration of the itinerary. This means that via iCal the whole trip schedule could be accessed via iPhone or any other iCal enabled smartphone. This means that there is hardly a need to print out any information.

Obviously the platform also contains a journal function. What is currently missing from this seems to be the possibility of adding photos. However, this is a really clever tool and one to watch.

A mash-up that maps all items in the itinerary to a Google map.

more reviews to follow…