If the price here was a little lower it would be a great sell.

I don’t see travel metasearch big success. the same will happen to info search.

if you really want offbeaten info, you will enjoy surfing the web as part of your travel. If you don’t have time than you need aquick list of good places you will ask your friends and concierge.

If I had the money of these (or at least a small part, and we talk about it ..) I would focus on the process of finding good recommendation not the content. And make the process enjoyable.

For people who have money for a service like this I would arrange a truely personalized guide with live agent sessions for getting the full requirements and would build the guide IN COLLABORATION with the client. Like a review process.

I would hire local guide who would sell this small effort as a amarketing tool for further touring sale.

In short I would try to understand the whole process of searching information and the trust issue which different than collecting content and packginfg it.

I wish I had a small part of that money to proove it.

bye

Presumably David is paying a license atleast for the maps? As they are definitely covered by a different license than for re-use online via an API - in the same way that Google nor MS can allow maps use on mobile as their licenses do not cover allowing users to access the API and use their map tiles (with their knowledge) on mobile…?

Surprised TC didn’t clarify this. Be great if you could…

@Michael - Rummble can provide you personalised content for your trip on your mobile. We don’t provide all the ancillary info, but partnering with others, that wouldnt be hard - we could just partner with OffBeat We’ll be getting our core offering polished right first, but meanwhile I’ll be making some calls…

Now users can print travel guides that contain information from ProfessionalTravelGuide’s database – the same professional database that all offline and online travel agents use – 300 fields of info on more than 159,000 hotels, 7,000 destinations guides, 10,000 hotel reviews, thousands of restaurant reviews, maps, etc.. and the prices start at $18.95.

One can also printout and/or download an eGuidebook from the site for free.

Since they use wikitravel etc which uses Creative Commons license. The resulting materials must also be in the same CC license. That implies their docs can be distributed and remixed freely. Isnt that a problem for them?

And again I wonder how this fits with the Creative Commons (CC) licence. I understand that if you use content, the result has to apply the same licence. So how can you sell it?

The bigger issue is this - if sucking data off other sites for resale is accepted as a general practice, we are going to see a fairly major restructuring of the web publishing game.

There is no practical difference between this and me sucking data off TechCrunch et al to resell as pdf books about technology companies - After all, we are one big naked conversation, right ;-).

(Actually, I note TC uses full copyright - thats one rapid change I expect to see on blogs and public wikis)

This is a classic scrape of the commons gig…… I can now safely predict the rush of a thousand scraper-publishers, the defensive acts by several thousand websites.

Mo’ thoughts here:

http://broadstuff.com/archives.....mmons.html

Has anyone actually been through the Paris guide? It is useless. Nothing is plotted on the maps, there are no map references for any sights, no street index… It is one great big exercise in copy/paste.

I also wonder what a guide for less well wiki-ed places would like like? What would an offbeat guide to Albania contain?

Anyone who is idiot enough to order one of these should send me $10 too for pointing out their folly.