Introduction

This post was inspired by a comment I left on Todd Lucier’s website regarding best-practices for mobile websites. The travel / tourism industry is not particularly advanced when it comes to use of web technologies (obviously excepting that some sites are much better than others). Many booking sites for hotels, airlines and so forth have very backwards – almost 1990’s style – interfaces; many destination websites allow for minimal user interaction with the site beyond clicking on links; those that do more often place high barriers to usage – account creation & verification, etc..

This post is about how travel / tourism sites – especially hotels, DMOs, CVBs, conventions, conferences, event holders – can easily improve at least one aspect of their site. It’s about how to allow sharing and distribution of information with others, particularly travelers!

This post should be readable by any professional who has content on the web. The technical bits are “high level” and my goal is that you should be able to point your IT/Web team to these recommendations and say “do this”.

The Webs

The phrase “Web 2.0″ has been popular for the last few years to describe certain trends in the web industry: incorporating user-generated content, social media, APIs,  the “read/write web”, using rounded corners and images with reflections, and so forth. Though a blurry concept, it’s a reasonable stake in the ground to differentiate what came before in the early days of the Internet: the web as a method for delivering relatively static or source-driven content on pages. Of course, once there was a Web 2.0 immediately people started to define what Web 3.0 should be: the semantic web, linked-data, and so forth. These terms are almost (but not quite) meaningless to the end user, but what they’re getting at is that Web 3.0 should also somehow incorporate information in well defined, usable ways so that data available in one place can be cleverly reused, repurposed or redistributed in surprising ways in other places.

To summarize to the point of absurdity:

• Web 1.0 is about pages
• Web 2.0 is about people
• Web 3.0 is about information

All these concepts, of course, have been in the web since the beginning. “Web #.0″ is a convenient shorthand about how much weight we’re putting on various concepts.

The Why – TripIt as an example

TripIt is a popular travel itinerary management website (and iPhone application). The “clever bit” about TripIt is that you can mail it your travel confirmations from your airline, hotel and so forth and it figures out what the message really means and builds a travel plan for you. However, there are several rather basic shortcomings:

• if you want to consume the information outside the context of TripIt, you’ll have to rebuild all the infrastructure yourself
• if TripIt doesn’t understand a message, data will have to be entered manually. Since you’re not Air Canada or Starwood Hotels, TripIt doesn’t understand your message (or your website)
• if message formats change – for any reason, including stylistic ones – TripIt will no longer understand the data until they catch up and write a new parser to understand the changes

There is an alternative that overcomes these issues. What if everyone agreed on common ways of expressing information so that custom parsers, etc. don’t have to be developed? Then anyone could potentially read and use the data in travel messages and on websites, and anyone (i.e. you) could create data that can be reused by those “anyones”.

Sounds hard or perhaps even obscure? It isn’t – some of technologies for doing this have been around as long as the Web, and you’re almost certainly using tools today that can take advantage of information shared in the proper formats.

iCalendar

iCalendar (also sometimes called vCalendar) is the standard for transferring information between calendars. Do you use Outlook, Outlook Express, Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, or iCal? Then any time you send a calendar entry to another person you’re also using iCalendar; if you sync two calendars, you’re using iCalendar. If you download an event on Eventful, Upcoming or Meetup – you’re using iCalendar.

Every event on your events calendar – individually, collectively and grouped by topic – should be available for download as iCalendar on your site. Your website is not the center of the traveler’s experience. By making the event transferable to their calendar – and other applications which can consume iCalendar – you’ve giving the traveler a little piece of your website that they can take away use the way that they prefer.

It’s also worth noting that if you’re using some sort of event management software or content management system, this should be near-trivial for your web team to implement correctly.

vCard

vCard is the standard for transferring information about people and organizational contacts. If you use Outlook, Outlook Express, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, (Macintosh) Mail, Lotus Notes and so forth, you’ve probably used vCard – especially if you’ve ever mailed a contact to another person.

You should create and place on your website vCards for your organization / destination, and for every person that you’re listing on your site. Why supply only an e-mail address when you can give a complete downloadable contact file with photos, maps, phone numbers, website addresses, etc.?

Like vCalendar, vCard is trivial to implement correctly.

Microformats

(This is the only paragraph that’s really explicitly Web 3.0, sorry).

Microformats provide another way for delivering information about your destination, hotel, event, etc. to applications that may want to consume it. The advantage of microformats over vCalendar and vCard is that the data is built directly into your web page , doesn’t have to be independently downloaded and that there are more types of data encodable using microformats. Furthermore and of special interest, search engines are starting to look for microformatted information in webpages and are displaying results in-line with search queries (Yahoo, Microsoft, Google).

This is more technically difficult to accomplish than vCard/iCalendar, but it certainly worth considering for larger websites – and probably essential for very large websites with many property listings.

Conclusions

I hope you’ve found this an interesting introduction to how you can use web technologies and formats today to share your information “Web 3.0″-style. There is nothing particularly esoteric about these recommendations – they are all well known and often used in the tech industry. Your management team should give direction to the web design and IT staff that these are the types of features you want to see in the next iteration of your website.

Please feel free to leave comments below, or follow me on Twitter at @dpjanes.