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 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.
the main interface of getjealous.com. The different content sections are navigated via tabs on the top.
Tags: travel guide, travel planner, web 2.0