how guardian.co.uk missed a trick or two

I'm always going on about how innovative guardian.co.uk has been recently. Ok, so the Comment is Free project isn't really as groundbreaking as Emily Bell hyped it up to be - in a nutshell, it's a whole bunch of blogs by people who already write for the Guardian and a few new names (Jeff Jarvis for example). But guardian.co.uk IS highly integrated with the print publication and that IS groundbreaking in comparison to the efforts of most other newspapers and print publications.

That said, today I stumbled across wikitravel. It appears I'm late to the game on this one because it was started in 2003 and was inspired by wikipedia. No, it's not a wiki set up as a travel agency, it's a travel site where users can submit tips, photos, reviews of hotels and sites, etc about cities and places around the world.

Hmmmm... that sounds familiar. Of course, all good ideas have to come from somewhere and this appears to have been the model for The Guardian's Been There. I'm not bashing the Guardian for not being original, afterall I really like Been There and it does have distinguishing features: it's design, the audience it attracts (who are more like me than those on wikitravel) and the guardian does take the online content and turn it into a two page spread within the travel section of the print publication (that's very cool!).

But... you might have read my post in response to Guardian.co.uk editor Simon Waldman's thoughts on the need for mainstream media to create a more decentralised publishing model.

Which got me thinking, why didn't The Guardian just figure out a way to use wikitravel for their Been There project? There is plenty of content on wikitravel and it's got Creative Commons licensing that, so long as they met certain criteria, would allow the newspaper to reuse content online and in print. And there are more benefits too: Wikitravel already has a working, and tested, backend engine; someone else is responsible for server hosting and bug fixing; moderation, if done at all, is taken care of by someone else; and much, if not all, of the legal risk is in the hands of wikitravel and not the Guardian.

I guess, if you were going to try to give this type of approach a name, you'd have to call it something like offshoring user generated content but that misses the point that in some instances, keeping audience content producers at arms length is actually the best way to engage with them.

Comment is Free and Been There are good websites but I wonder if they're sustainable in the long-term. What happens when they get too popular and moderation costs soar beyond what can be paid for with a million £ profit? Both are examples of where the Guardian could have been brave and tried to engage with existing content producers, using existing platforms rather than rolling out the old "build and own" model. I'm really hoping their next big thing will be a music section that links to reader's myspace profiles or CCmixer mashups, a section of the website that gives users the opportunity to tell journalists what they would like to have written about (as suggested by Richard Sambrook in his guest blogger entry here), or a place where readers can start, host, and manage their own discussions about the news like on newsvine. Then I'd be able to really rave about the Guardian again and everyone knows that's one of my favourite pastimes!

[audio version of this post and a little test to see if itunes picks it up as a podcast if I use the .mp3 url instead of the talkr one.]

(Please note that the above post, as always, contains my personal views and not those of my employer.)

Comments

[Jani Patokallio]

The big difference between Wikitravel and BeenThere, TripAdvisor, VirtualTourist etc is that Wikitravel attempts to create a single, coherent, objective *guide* for each destination, while the other sites offer just a grab bag of miscellaneous tips. BeenThere to its credit attempts to distill those tips into a coherent guide for the weekly newspaper special -- but this just happens once for each place, and then the article fades into obsolescence.

[Neil McIntosh]

Interesting thoughts Robin... we certainly looked around the web before doing Been there; we simply thought there was nobody doing the kind of stuff we wanted to do with our own site.

Put simply, Wikitravel doesn't strike me as a particularly interesting place to browse while you're thinking of going on holiday. And, as you say, we've got a crowd contributing to Been there that's very different to Wikitravel. For you (and many others) that's a Good Thing; what our users have created is a site with a distinctive voice.

Nobody else is, or can, do a Been There, or a Comment is free, because in both cases the one of the distinctive elements, one of the USPs, is what our audience adds to it. That's the power of user-generated content. If you have a brand with a distinctive voice, chances are the audience will have a distinctive voice too.

Been there is also an interesting experiment for us in the different forms of user interaction that we can facilitate; it's hard for a contributor to break our Ts and Cs by clicking to vote for a restaurant... (we hope).

[Evan Prodromou]

It's probably worth noting that Wikitravel is more of an attempt to create professional-quality travel guides -- replacing your Frommer's or Lonely Planet -- rather than a tips-n-tricks or personal-travel-stories type of site. I think it'd probably be a good source for travel writers, though, and of course the CC license is made just for that purpose.