Category — Media

Can we rely on travel information we find on the Internet? An exchange on Twitter with entrepreneur and world travelling phenomenon Gary Arndt set me thinking.

@hackneye (me): Being right more of the time is what guidebooks do better than the Web. It therefore makes me sad to see one with horrendous errors.
@EverywhereTrip (Gary): I’d disagree that they get things right more than the web. They are always 1-4 years out of date given the publication cycle.

@hackneye: Yes, they can be, and sometimes that’s important. But they also tend to be researched and fact-checked more carefully.
@EverywhereTrip: So long as the public can edit the info, errors can be corrected quickly online. 1,000′s of people checking instead of 1.

@hackneye: I agree. But the public don’t correct most of the travel content on the Web. Hence the variable quality.
@EverywhereTrip: What is an example of this? Most pages have comments, or at least a way to contact the owner.

@hackneye: An example of what? An uncorrected error on a travel site? Just Google your hometown and dig around.
@EverywhereTrip: That’s the thing. I don’t see much incorrect information. People always give theoretical examples, never concrete ones.

@hackneye: Chelsea’s football ground is the site of a battle that took place 200 miles away: http://bit.ly/agSoZN… Michelangelo’s David is in the Uffizi: http://bit.ly/aq8Vfn [it isn't]. 2 quick searches, 2 highly ranked sites.

@EverywhereTrip: So leave a comment correcting the information problem solved.
@hackneye: I admire your idealism. It’s a fine quality. But I suspect ‘correcting the Internet’ is too big a job.

@EverywhereTrip: The internet is a work in progress. If you see an error, correct it. Everyone does a little bit and it adds up…

And so it continued, with a 140-character limit becoming increasingly unsatisfactory for expressing quite complex ideas. [Read more →]

One of the (many) things I find genuinely useful about Twitter is the ability to get an instant answer or opinion on just about anything. Like this:

Wondering: in the medium term, which is worth more to a tourism business: 1. Nice mention in a guidebook. 2. Nice mention in a paper. Ideas? [@hackneye]

I  didn’t really have a motive for asking this, other than genuine, theoretical curiosity. It strikes me that many PR companies put a lot of effort into courting periodical, weekly and daily media, and a whole lot less time on guidebook writers. Maybe PRs know something that isn’t immediately apparent to me. [Read more →]

Last November I wrote a piece outlining the worrying implications of the BBC’s acquisition of Lonely Planet for the Corporation’s non-commercial UK neutrality. I’m not the only travel journalist with these sorts of doubts. The BBC Royal Charter and Agreement, remember, is very clear on how the Beeb can and cannot interact with the UK media market:

The Agreement requires all commercial activities undertaken by the BBC to comply with four criteria. …

4. comply with BBC fair trading guidelines and in particular avoid distorting the market.

Of course, that begs a whole series of questions, but this much is plain: BBC Worldwide activities that distort a domestic market in which the corporation is a player are forbidden. This, essentially, was the basis for the decision to disallow BBC investment in ultra-local video last year. It’s the reason that the BBC’s acquisition (through BBC Worldwide) of Lonely Planet should be reversed at the first opportunity. [Read more →]

It was announced this week that my second guidebook, co-written with Stephen Keeling, has been judged Best Guidebook 2008 at the ENIT Travel Writing Awards. Obviously, we’re chuffed to bits to have impressed the panel of Italian tourism experts, and to have beaten so many other fantastic new guidebooks. The new goal is for my next book, due out next year, to win the 2009 prize.

There’s more on the announcement here:

The winning Frommer’s title written by authors Donald Strachan and Stephen Keeling was singled out for the quality of its research, writing and opening up a new area in Italian tourism.

It’s a commonplace on this site that one should “defend” the BBC from unceasing, unsubtle and rather tiresome attacks from trenchant right-wingers. Very little written about the organization by either the Daily Mail, or any of its apers on the Web, has any merit. That’s true. The Beeb is worth defending: there’s something enriching about our ad-free broadcaster. Something that serves the public, that stands above the commercial white noise of modern television. Of course, the organization isn’t entirely non-commercial: BBC Worldwide makes decent profits that, at least nominally, feed back into UK public service broadcasting. So far, so uncontroversial. However, BBC Worldwide’s 2007 acquisition of travel guidebook publisher Lonely Planet did raise objections, [Read more →]

So, who wants to hear a joke?

Q: What’s the difference between libertarianism and anarchism?

A: Under anarchism, the poor people get to shoot back.

Boom, boom. I guess that’s more a caricature than a joke, as such. Anyway, I’m not here for the standup. What I want to address is the arts, partly by way of reply to Chris’s post here last week, specifically the estimable libertarian objection to arts funding. In libertopia, arts funding is for private individuals. “There is no such thing as society” (some of them really write stuff like that, non-ironically), so spending on the collective is wasted. Immoral. Theft. In any case, the Dead Hand of the State (10,300 Google hits for a phrase I’ve never heard anyone actually speak) can only have a pernicious impact on private interaction, and what could be more private than art?

Let’s look at some evidence. [Read more →]