As of today you will be able to subscribe to RSS feeds on various levels for all sites of the GoSeeTell Network.

Some examples:
- Feeds for all new tips for each site (Fun Stuff - New tips)
- Feeds for each of the over 90,000 cities featured on the GoSeeTell Network (”Newest tips”)
- Personalized feeds with recommendations for each user and for each of the 90,000 cities (”Things you might like”)

Just look for the little orange RSS symbols to add your feed.

If you are not sure what RSS feeds are, you can learn more at Wikipedia.

Consumers who participate in travel sites that offer user generated content want suppliers to interact with them.

Compete, Inc. today announced findings from its latest study, “Consumer Generated Content in Travel”, which finds that a majority of consumers support a brand responding to consumer generated reviews. Travelers are increasingly turning to their peers as a valued research source and encourage travel marketers to join them in this dialogue.

So you hotels, attractions, restaurants and other suppliers out there: your customers - and potential customers want to hear from you!

Give them what they want, because a lot of money is at stake:

Compete estimates that consumer generated content (CGC) influences over $10 billion a year in online travel. With consumers finding CGC more credible than they do professional reviews or information from travel companies, CGC has emerged as a critical source of travel information.

More on the study at Hotelmarketing.com.

More and more current and up-and-coming evangelists are blogging about us.
But not only that, they are also sharing their views and recommendations on the sites of the GoSeeTell Network.
More, more, more!!! We want to hear it all.

eelnahs, this one is for you!

While I did not have a chance to attend the Travolution Summit last week I found a very nice video from the conference.
In it several industry insiders give their perspective of the challenges that the travel industry is facing for the next 12 months.

While the perspectives are for sure tilted towards trends and issues in the online segment some themes emerged across the board:
- UCG, UCG, UCG, UCG - do we need to say more?
- The issue of trust and authority in an online environment
- The impact the whole environmental footprint debate will have
- Rise of video in an online environment
- Creating loyalty

Find the video here.

User you can trust now look even better! In an improvements to the sites of the GoSeeTell Network we now show the Trustiness for each user as a green bar under each user photo. The more green in the bar, the more trustworthy the user. A mouse-over the bar show the exact number for the Trustiness of the user. Now judging who you can trust is even easier!

Maybe we are on to something. Just a hunch. Gut feeling.

PhoCusWright announced today the theme for their next conference and it will be - tata - The Long Tail.

According to PhoCusWright:

Customers communicating with other customers has triggered an unprecedented social networking phenomenon and a resurgence in the Long Tail economy. The Long Tail debunks the old 80/20 rule or Pareto principle. Defending an 80/20 strategy is getting risky. So is automatically dismissing the value of low volume products, under-the-radar channels, small customer groups and obscure key words.

In the Long Tail, embracing niches wins because they cumulatively outnumber or outweigh higher frequency plays. Big companies are successfully harvesting lots of little things while “Davids” are beating “Goliaths” because the size of a reputation matters more than the size of a marketing budget. The alleged “leveling of the playing field” that was supposed to have occurred in the 1.0 world has finally come into its own. Little guys compete on the merits of the products and services, not the size of their marketing budgets. Big guys are all of a sudden at increased risk if they ignore too many little things.

Why do we like to hear this? Well, at GoSeeTell we are betting on the long tail. Instead of building on website we are creating a network of multiple sites that are interlinked while serving different communities.

Niche + network effects = GoSeeTell Network

Brandweek recently had an article about how DMOs are trying to get their arms around user generated content.

“Ad speak and market speak are dead,” said Dale Brill, CMO at Visit Florida, the Sunshine State’s official tourism unit. “Consumers don’t want to hear ad copy. They want to hear first-person from people who are out there.”

It will be interesting to see who the “people who are out there” will be once more DMOs start offering social networking tool. Who will deliver content: consumers or journalists paid by the DMO? Will users be able to share their opinions? Will user generated content be filtered and edited? Time will tell …

Click here to see the Brandweek article.

Have you looked at your Passport lately? We are talking about your Passport page, not your paper document.

Over the last days the Passport pages have gotten a complete make-over. The pages not only look prettier, it is also much easier to quickly find all relevant information. Now it is even easier to connect with other users, find places they like and read reviews they have written.

But this is not all. We have also redesigned the process for adding tips and reviews. Instead of 4 steps it now takes only 2 steps to add your opinion and you can manually place a marker on the map for the place you are writing about (if you want to).

Happy tip-writing!

In a major milestone we have released the first version of our recommendation tool on the sites of the GoSeeTell Network.
Registered users are now able to see on the overview page for each city a list of 5 places that they might find interesting.

The suggestions are generated by comparing the places the respective users has rated and his/her interests (according to the user’s profile) with those of other users. The more information a user provides in form of ratings and profile information, the more accurate the recommendations are.

To see the recommendation tool at work:
- Sign-up as a user
- Enter some of your interests in your profile page
- Rate cities and places you know (in any of the 90,000 cities in the database)
- Have a look at cities like Portland, Frankfurt or Munich to get your personal recommendations

As next steps we will start displaying recommendations for the individual categories (e.g. restaurants in New York City, hotels in Barcelona etc.).
After that (and once we have more data-points) the AlterEgoTrips tool will be rolled out. The tool will allow users to get one-click recommendations for the destinations in the database.

It took us a while but we are finally getting started, the great GoSeeTell Blog is on the way!