Travelblather

I’ve not posted for a while. I got a really nice tweet from @DavidRobertHogg this week saying he wanted to read more from me. (Thank you).

The reason (apart from being busy) is frankly I’m depressed about the way things are going online. It feels like I might rant about how 'real people matter' and 'quality content counts', but the macro data suggests that actually the billions of schmucks who use the net couldn’t give a toss. For them the price-quality ratio has become totally decoupled. They expect to get stuff for free or at nominal cost and don’t think for a moment about what that means about what they are getting. It’s depressing.

The most recent example is one I came across mourning the fact that my Seville guidebook will probably never be published in print again. (Thanks Google). I was looking at Amazon and came across a Kindle-only competitor. It costs £1.02 compared with my guidebook which costs £6.74. (Admittedly my guidebook isn’t available as a Kindle book so it’s not a completely fair comparison). Guide to Seville by EUprintpresspublishing is a piece of crap – probably copied and pasted from Wikipedia and I think put through a piece of translation software. A couple of sentences from the first paragraph:

“Seville (Seville Seville in English or in Spanish) is the artistic, cultural and financial capital of Andalusia and Seville province. It is situated in a plane passing through the Guadalquivir river – sailing from Seville to the site of injection in the bay of Cadiz in the Atlantic ocean.”

What a piece of unmitigated shite.

I tweeted about it and got some amused tweets of horror back from other travel writers like @Mike_Gerrard, @mary_novakovich and @itsjamesstewart as they looked at other examples from the series and came up with:

“house-boats in Amsterdam are 'complete homes with electricity, water, gas and sewage'”

“inside the Cuba guide it refers to that well-known cook 'Chef Guevara'

Should Amazon (and others who are tech companies but pretend they are publishers like Google and Apple) engage in at least some quality control and not let people publish crap like this?

Mike suggested that ‘people would decide if these books are any good’. The Seville guide does have two 1* reviews which are pretty explicit about how bad the guides are. Like this one:

“A few pages of badly translated, half baked information. I was shocked to find that such an item was available.”

But Mike also discovered that EVERY guide has a glowing 5-star review by someone called Deni who didn't buy the book.

This then is ‘content’ online these days. The idiots who use the internet are so dumb, they buy it. And the people who publish it engage in fraudulent activity to promote it.

Is there anything we can do? Will the market ensure crap like this sinks to the bottom of the pile or will we all drown in piles of it and find it increasingly hard to discover the good stuff?

'Big data’ is a phrase that’s getting a lot of airplay at the moment. The basic premise is that nowadays we have the computing power at our fingertips to be able to crunch massive quantities of disparate information and use it to unearth previously unappreciated things - about people.

The US election came down ultimately to just few counties in a few swing states according to various media reports. And that’s because both parties had huge databases of information that they had gathered about voters that allowed them to predict very accurately how states and even counties would vote long before polling day. This allowed them to micromanage the campaign. Spending their resources only on the people that ‘mattered’.

On the one hand this seems really smart. It’s a bit of a holy grail for marketers this kind of stuff. To roll out the oft quoted phrase attributed to John Wanamaker. "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” Increasingly with the web and big data to help them, marketers DO know which half is wasted. (Or they think they do.)

Take this thinking to its conclusion and you can see that in politics this approach could be massively undemocratic. People who live in states which are bound to vote a particular way regardless (according to the data wonks) aren’t worth talking to at all. Leave them alone – don’t even bother to tell them anything much at all. Conversely, imagine if you just happen to live in one of the key swing state counties that the data wonks have worked out really matter – your vote is suddenly worth exponentially more than the votes of millions of people elsewhere. It would be worth moving to one of these counties just to have that kind of influence.

I’ve recently read The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser and it’s just brilliant. Its basic premise is quite similar. As algorithms get better and better at knowing what you want (or what they think you want), they’ll just keep dishing that up and you’ll never see anything else. So, click on the same friend a few more times on Facebook and their updates get pushed up in your newsfeed – do that enough and it’s possible that you’ll increasingly see only the updates of same few friends that Facebook thinks ‘really’ matter to you at the expense of all the others. Likewise for Google. Keep searching for say information that suggests you have a bias towards voting Republican (stuff that’s pro gun ownership maybe?) and slowly the search engine will start serving up more of the same and you’ll see less and less stuff that’s more Democrat leaning (stuff that’s pro gay marriage for example). You’ll begin to be locked inside a bubble of stuff that is highly 'relevant' to you to the extent that it will shut out all conflicting points of view.

Both of these concepts are fundamentally about the ability of technology to know us better than we know ourselves or to be better at deducing subtle connections than we can ever hope to be. And maybe (maybe) it is. But is that a good thing?

You know all that stuff you stick on your Facebook page? It’s not just Facebook using it. It gets sold on to huge third party companies that use it to model and predict behaviour. They are getting better and better at it. Soon they will know that because you like Homeland you are more likely to buy one brand of soft drink over another or one car over another. Did you know that when you read a book on Kindle, Amazon is watching what you read? So you spent the afternoon reading a book of fiction which has a chapter in it featuring a car chase where the hero drives a BMW? It won’t be long before the ad you get served up next time you hit Amazon will be for… a BMW.

So… you might have guessed that I’m not a huge fan of big data. I believe the Net should be about helping us make more interesting and unexpected connections – about serendipity and about humanity ahead of technology and profit.

What has all this got to do with content then? This week a company called Percolate raised 9 million USD in series A funding. Percolate has developed a platform to help brands use social media more effectively. It uses an algorithm to suggest content ideas for social media community managers (ie the people that run a brand’s Facebook page or blog etc). This means they can spend their time producing more content that’s ‘appropriate’ more quickly.

To quote some of the stuff on their website: Percolate’s goal is to make content creation easy by prompting community managers with ideas and inspiration…  Percolate is constantly scanning for interesting areas for the brand to explore for stock content, whether that’s a long-form blog post, an infographic or a video.

Who needs research and consideration to write content? Just get an algorithm to come up with the ideas for you. But how would you feel if you were reading stuff created off the back of prompts from a piece of technology rather than by a real person?

Here's the content of my talk at Travelblogcamp - delivered to a boisterous room of travel writers, bloggers, PRs and tour cos on the evening of Tuesday 6th November.

What does back to basics mean?

I thought long and hard about this. I decided for me it means putting aside the bright glittery things that the internet throws at us and remembering what really matters. Sure technology marches onwards – but you know what? People are still people. They still have similar desires when it comes to choosing a holiday. They still need similar information much of the time.

Apparently there’s some kind of big election going on this evening. Something to do with the next leader of the free world (apparently). And back to basics has a bit of a campaigning edge to it doesn’t it. It could almost be a conservative party slogan.

So, ladies and gents – I give you my Back to Basics content manifesto. Like I say, it’s at heart all about trying to ignore the frilly bullshit of the net and focus on important stuff. Stuff that’s about people, not machines.

Like any good manifesto it has a bunch of bullet points - unlike most manifestos there will probably be a few swear words.

1) Great content isn’t regulated by Google
I hate the way Google has become this all-knowing arbiter of what’s best. We are so lazy – it’s so damn easy to click the first search result Google (or Bing for that matter) comes back with. You know what – I’ll let you into a little secret. Google is still gameable. Big companies spend zillions on SEO because despite all the pandas and penguins you can still game the algorithm. And frankly – it just isn’t that good anyway. So… people… once in a while make yourself go to page 6. Don’t let Google dictate what is or isn’t good. And if you find something that’s good there… on page 6. Promote it… talk about it. Tell your friends and colleagues to read it. Go on - G+ it if you really must.

2) Great content should not be at the behest of advertisers
If your business model relies solely on advertising, then the ad guys will rule the roost and sure as day follows night the content you publish will be compromised. They just want your content to sell stuff for them. People don’t as a rule like being sold to very much. I read a great interview in the Times magazine with Lewis Hamilton a while back. There was sentence in there about how Lewis was wearing a particular brand of watch (Tag if you want to know). It was totally unsubtle. So much so that I’m sure the writer did it on purpose. Lewis Hamilton is of course sponsored by them. I hate that shit. It is so demeaning to the reader. Are we – any of us – that easy to influence? (PR people – next time you insist on some kind of lunatically obvious product placement… ask yourself what the point is. And if it’s just to keep your client happy have the guts to tell then they are wrong.)

3) Great content should not be free
I hate the way content online is free. It distorts the market. How can we as consumers tell what’s good and what’s not if there is no price attached to anything? It’s the most basic of mechanisms in consumer society. And the smart arses who came up with the idea of short circuiting it did us all a massive disservice. By ‘good’ I don’t just mean how well written something is, but how trustworthy and believable. Friends – if you are enjoying ‘free’ content or ‘free’ social networks – firstly it might well not be any good. Secondly you are paying for it – far more subtle and dubious ways. YOU are the content. Your every move is being watched so that you can be sold stuff. The sophistication of this technology is getting better and better – but it has hardly started. I don’t like that one little bit. If you want a great book to put on your Christmas present list I cannot recommend The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From Youby Eli Pariser highly enough. If you want to really see where the free model will end up… read it and be as concerned as I am. Don’t worry – there’s a link to the book on my blog – right now.

4) Great content is all about the reader
I work for a search and social media agency iCrossing part time – mainly because I got bored of the lousy money on offer for travel writing. One thing that I have been amazed by is the number of big brand companies that you ask ‘who is your customer’ and they don’t have a clue. The old model of creating search term driven fluff to reel people in and try and sell them stuff has made many larger travel brands totally lazy. They just spent cash gaming Google to get them at the top of search results and sat back. Just pour as many people in the top of the funnel and enough will book to keep you in business. It’s leading to a superabundance of cheap crap on the internet. Great content by contrast is written with a reader in mind. Do you know who yours are? If you take the time to create content that's properly focussed on your reader, they will come back. There's this old marketing maxim called the 80/20 rule. 20 % of your customers account for 80% of your business. Instead of just chucking as many people through the front door of your website as possible - try developing long term relationships with that 20% - they'll keep coming back if you give them reason to.

5) Great content takes time to create
One of the things that defines quality is uniqueness. And writing something unique takes time and research and consideration. It’s a craft. As readers we need to get better at spotting that kind of really great stuff and promoting it. And as content creators we need to stand up to whoever pays the bill and tell them how much it will cost and why they should make the investment. Sure it’s easy to say and hard to do – but the recent changes in the algorithm have produced this sudden obsession with content. In some ways that’s a good thing – at least it has made people think about content seriously. But it’s still all too often all about churning out mediocre content as fast as possible for SEO purposes. Insist on giving them better content and make them pay. It’s about quality not quantity. If you’ve banged something out in half an hour without doing any research first – take it from me – it’s crap.

6) Great content is about detail
Writing really good travel journalism is in my opinion about spotting the little things that people miss and surfacing them in smart and concise ways. Often it’s about taking the time to stop and look and listen and smell and taste. Moments of quiet on busy trips are often hard to come by – but they are gold dust. A vital part of listening is asking the right kinds of questions of the right kinds of people. Really good travel journalism is often about telling stories – other peoples’ stories. Learning to seek out those hidden gems of interest or local wisdom and finding entertaining and engaging ways to communicate them takes time and focus. It’s a craft and it’s something you can get better at even if you’ve done it for a decade or more.

7) Great content is collaborative
Remember editors? The role of the editor has been forgotten in the online world of self-published blogs. Editors can be arrogant people – but they tend to be where they are for a reason. The people in editorial positions at national magazines and newspapers and book publishers have an instinct for their readers that has taken years to develop. Importantly they are people (not an algorithm). They choose what to publish and what not to publish for all sorts of reasons. Some very subtle – often quite human. Content – proper content – is about real communication. And that suggests a relationship. Relationships are quirky, fun, frustrating things – but they are all about being human. I don’t want a machine dictating what I should read. I want a real person. Editors don’t just add coherence and relevance – they also ensure quality control. I’m sorry. Maybe kids in their 20s don’t care about decent sentence construction and grammar. But I do. That’s not about being pedantic. It’s about the craft of writing – things like rhythm, assonance, alliteration, metaphors and similes.

 What do you think?

As promised, here's a second guest post - this one from travel writer David Whitley - he's taking a meat cleaver to certain practices in the SEO industry. Do you agree with him? 

The offal trade
Imagine, for the purpose of an overly extended metaphor, that you are a butcher. You know a shady character who will sell you discarded offal from the abattoir on the cheap. It’s not fit for human consumption, but you convince a few gullible restaurant-owners they can sell it as steak.

The restaurateurs  make a profit as a result of your offal, but are eventually fined heavily by trading standards or shut down by the police. So you suggest they  at least try to make the offal look like steak by hiding it inside other poor quality meat. And – even better – you’ll do the hiding for them. Customers soon realise they’re not being fed steak and leave in their droves. The restaurants get a reputation for poor quality which is passed on to the supplier – you.

It doesn’t take a genius to see what’s going to happen – the restaurants are either going to struggle to survive or get shut down. And if the same doesn’t happen to you, then the police are going to keep such a close eye on you that you may as well give up too.

The Trojan horses of SEO
This, I think, is where we currently stand with the web advertising industry. Or at least the SEO/ linkbuilding sector of it anyway. First they tried disguising links as adverts in the sidebars, and Google slapped down the sites that were buying such links. Now they’re trying to fill the web with sponsored posts written entirely for the purpose of squeezing in a link disguised as a feature. And if a website owner is really lucky, the SEO agency will supply a guest post that just about scans but is in no way readable. Again, the guest post is a Trojan horse for a link aimed at boosting Google rankings.

Jeremy’s previous post  - and several excellent comments – addressed this topic. The crux is that search engines (most pertinently, Google) want good quality content. Instead of continually finding ways to sneak around Google’s ever-increasing menagerie of toothy guard animals, SEO spivs are going to have to start attaching their links to that good quality content that Google wants. And that doesn’t mean looking for ever more sophisticated ways to dress the offal up as steak.

The dying sponsored post model
Here’s a prediction. The ‘sponsored post’ model that both marketers and owners of insipid blogs are so eager to cling to is dying. You can keep pumping it with ever more elaborate drugs, but it is fatally flawed. The ‘sponsorship’ in the term is closer in spirit to that in “state-sponsored terrorism” than “The FA Cup, proudly sponsored by E.On”.

That doesn’t mean that sponsored posts can’t work, however. In fact, done right, they’re probably far less obnoxious to the reader than flashing display adverts. But the sponsorship model needs to be more along the lines of sponsoring football clubs or roundabouts than sponsoring industrial sabotage. SEO people shouldn’t be thinking: “How can I sneak this by?” They should be thinking: “What would I be proud to attach this to?”

Let’s go back to the butcher’s shop. As it turns out, the cost of buying edible offal from the abattoir isn’t much more than buying the unfit stuff from the shady trader. There’s some more good news too – there are some restaurants in town that have good chefs. Chefs who have really good recipes which the offal can fit inoffensively into. They won’t pretend that the offal is steak, but they will make excellent sausages or meat pies that have small bits of your offal in them.

These restaurants can get a strong reputation and loyal customer base, while your butcher’s shop can bask in the glow of that reputation by boasting that you’re a proud supplier. Just let the chefs add the offal to their own recipes in a way that they know is best rather than trying to supply your own recipe book and forcing them to pretend it’s steak.

Launching the new model
Last week, I relaunched my website, GrumpyTraveller.com. With it, I put up an advertising rate card and details of advertising I will and won’t accept. The basic gist is that vetted advertisers are allowed to sponsor posts on the site for a fee, but that the topics of said post will be of my choosing. Alongside the post, they get a banner advert and a 75 word blurb at the bottom with a maximum of two links. That blurb needs to be aimed at humans rather than search engines – more a “we’re proud to be associated with this content and we’d like to tell you about what we do” than a desperate exercise in link stuffing. I’ll reject anything written as search engine bait. But once it is right, that ad and blurb stays with the post forever.

“We can supply a guest post…”
This is all pretty clearly explained, but I’ve already had queries about sponsored posts from SEO agencies who clearly can’t read. They’re wedded to the idea of providing guest posts stuffed with links. Frankly, if the guest post was any good, they’d be running it on their own site and attracting links organically from people who want to share and draw attention to it. It’s like when Gary Barlow writes one of his rare good songs, he saves it for Take That whilst churning out tons of mediocre ones to give to former X Factor contestants.

I’ve no doubt that I’ll also get a few unimpressed marketers who’ll tell me that what I’m charging is more than other sites charge.

Cheap audiences?
Fine by me, chaps. Go and sneak your links onto other sites where owners are happy to fill up their great web toilet with as much faeces as they can get paid for. When that toilet overflows and everyone involved comes out stinking of effluent, then the pariah status will be richly deserved.

I’m proud of the content on my site. It’s not just OK – it’s really good. I sincerely hope the readers of that content think so as well. I sincerely hope they trust its integrity and read it with the thoughtful intelligence that the comments (both on-site and via Twitter) suggest.

That’s not a cheap audience, and I won’t give them cheap content funded by cheap advertising. Want cheap and mediocre? Then there are plenty of other avenues. Good luck to you staggering down those increasingly dangerous alleys.

What advertising should be based on
The web needs an advertising model based on fairness, honesty and mutual benefit rather than deceit and desperately trying to resist arrest. One of human beings employing their brains, taste and judgement to think about what is a good fit. It needs something along the lines of sponsoring a small football or cricket club – you’re helping to fund something you’re proud to be associated with, whilst taking the opportunity to explain what you do to a distinct audience. Nothing sneaky, nothing nasty, nothing borderline dishonest.

It’d be sad to think that this idea is too revolutionary to stomach, but I suspect it will be for a while yet. Still, when the crushing realisation dawns that it’s far better to play well than search for gaps in the rule book, I’m happy to talk. I suspect a few other site owners will be too.

Image by: bunchofpants

I’m planning more posts about the future of publishing to complement the series that my editor at Frommer’s Mark Henshall wrote a month or so back. Mark dealt mainly with theory – although he also provided lots of links to examples.

But what about the practice?

Actually publishing on the iPad or adapting a guidebook series for the iPhone? How easy is it? What works and what doesn’t?

I got a recent email from a guy called Thomas Tegart. He and a friend are self-publishing a new travel magazine on the iPad called Overnight Buses. What I particularly like is their focus on ‘long form’ content (as it’s called these days). To you and me – a decent read rather than the usual 500 words of fluff or contrived list of top whatevers that constitutes a travel piece on-line.

So I asked him a bunch of questions and he provided some interesting responses! You can try the launch edition of Overnight Buses for FREE from the app store.

If you’re a travel company or tourist board they’re looking for launch advertisers with free spots available to help them test the product – see Q4. If you’re a travel writer, they are accepting submissions – I’ve provided a link at the end of this post.

Their submission guidelines made me smile:

“NO guides, how-to’s, where to’s, what’s hot, hotel reviews, top-ten beach lists, best places to go, recommendations or anything involving a cruise ship unless a murder took place and you solved it. Please.” [emphasis theirs!]

Over to you Thomas…

What made you set up Overnight Buses Travel Magazine (OBTM)?
The reasons were both personal and professional. I was a lawyer sick of working 15 hour days, and my co-founder wanted the chance to design something besides ads. We both love travel and love reading travel writing and the chance to contribute something more to that genre was very appealing. The normal entrepreneurship reasons also apply: the chance to control your own destiny and to shape your own company. Both of us also wanted to create a social responsible company that would play a part in the community we live in. It's not yet happening because the revenue isn't there, but we hope in the future it will be something we're proud of.

What differentiates OBTM from similar publications?
What differentiates us from a content point of view is our focus on long-form travel articles. There is quite a bit of competition in the travel website space and from blogs and travel magazines in general, but many of them don't publish really long travel narratives. Three of our current travel articles are over 5000 words. We also decided not to focus on destination pieces or short snippets. That is our main differentiator in terms of content. We differentiate ourselves on the App Store by our concentration on design. Ours is a pretty simple app, but we focused on readability, even going so far as to count our characters per line to make sure they were the optimal length for reading. My co-founder Jen Kuhn is a CLIO award winning designer, so that helped too.

As far as I know, there are not any other long-form travel magazines on the iPad yet; we're the only one. There is another iPad travel magazine start-up called TRVL that focuses on mostly travel photography, and of course the established big media players in the industry have their iPad apps. There are also some long-form apps out there and webpages dedicated to longer stories, like the Atavist and Longreads, but nothing dedicated solely to travel writing on the iPad.

How do you see self-publishing like this changing/developing in the next 12 to 18 months?
I see a lot more independent publishers like us getting into the act. Publishing is basically free if you know how to design and can learn a bit of code. Our platform is a free open source publishing tool called Baker. So for us, we managed to design and launch a travel magazine in about 4 months with just two people. Besides the cost of acquiring content, the only other cost was the $99 fee to become an Apple developer. Of course, we already had the Adobe software, a Mac and everything else needed to design, but basically anyone else with a Mac could have done the same thing using free tools as well.

What will make OBTM financially successful?
Finding advertisers that fit our brand and expanding our readership base, just like other magazines. There are over 60 million iPads out there, so if you think in old school terms of the market opportunity, that's basically almost the population of Great Britain. Definitely enough to support a few travel magazines. Another thing that will make us successful is finding great contributors and raising our rates to get the best stories.

In terms of revenue, we will be testing out ads with an update to make sure our analytics is working and matching up page views correctly (we are giving out free space in exchange for people helping us test). Then we plan on soliciting ads for our second issue that will be launched in July. Incidentally, if you know anyone at a tourism board who might be interested in a free ad let me know. All they would have to do is share their analytics with us to make sure our ad is counting everything correctly. The ad would only run for a few months, so not very long. We already have ads for an app, a guidebook and some travel books, so a tourism ad would be a great way to show some diversity while we're testing.

Do you have any start-up funding?
We don't have any investors. I had saved up a bit of money as a lawyer and we're using that to buy our stories, so we're pretty bootstrapped. We have enough for a few issues and will be using advertising to extend that period as we go. Really the only thing that made this possible was Baker, as it allowed us to use our current skills to publish. It’s basically a wrap around for a website. Our app is really running on Mobile Safari, Apple's web browser, but all the content is on the device, so no internet connection is necessary. Baker allows you to code normal webpages and then wraps it up in an app and hides that from the user. Before Baker we were stuck with figuring out how to publish without needing to learn how to code. Baker still requires a bit of Mac coding skills, which I had to learn, along with knowing how to code HTML, which I also had to learn. But coding HTML is rather simple to understand and Mac coding is not, so Baker put our app within reach.

How do you plan to build an audience?
I'm doing a PR campaign by myself. My co-founder Jen has a full-time job at the moment, so her spare time is taken up with that and then designing the next issue. That's about it for now until we have advertising revenue, which should begin with the second issue. Our contributors have been very helpful in spreading the word so far as well and the App Store also provides a built-in audience, though not as much as you would expect.

What 3 things would you differently/key things have you learnt so far?
I'm not sure we would have done much differently. I've made a few mistakes so far in my PR campaign, but nothing too serious. One of the key things I've learned is to stay motivated. Doing a PR campaign is like getting constantly rejected for dates, it's quite discouraging. But staying positive is key. So is only concentrating on what NEEDS to be done. We both have stuff we want to get done, like having a great website or being on twitter, but we both have realized we don't have the energy for everything. So we try and concentrate only what has to be done to launch.

I also wish I was a better editor. We get many submissions that are good stories, but they're not great. I can tell a great story from a good one, I just can't edit a good story into a great one. I know something is wrong with the story, but I can't tell the author how to fix it. It’s a drawback of mine that I wish I knew how to fix, because it's hard to turn writers away. Some stories just need a little work, but I can't seem to pin down what it is.

If you’d like to write for Overnight buses check out the submissions guidelines

And if you’d like to try it out head to the App store – it’s FREE for now.

Have you considered publishing an iPad app? Do you reckon this idea will work?