@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 They are always 1-4 years out of date given the publication cycle.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. It never really occurred to me that my opening gambit was controversial. I’ve worked with guidebooks for years, and have seen (and, yes, made) sloppy errors. Have any made it as far as print? Sure, a few. But I’m certain I’ve never seen the kind of howlers that I discovered with 2 cursory searches on Google. I’ve never seen a guidebook that claims David is in the Uffizi; almost anyone who’s even read about Florence knows that. Nobody needs a guidebook, of course, and Google (heck, even Yahoo!) easily beats one for up-to-date pricing information. But a well crafted guide (like a history book) can enrich a visit; to compare the Blue Guide to Tuscany, say, with a Google search is to commit an obvious category error.

Further, I can think of at least 6 reasons that we’ll never be able to rely on travel information pulled from a search:

1. The Internet’s strength is also its weakness from a travel information point of view. It’s unedited and (partly) democratic. Ten cheers for that. However, there is no democracy of facts, facts need checking, then double-checking… and fact-checking means editors.
2. The Web follows something like a geometric pattern of growth. The number of people willing to spend their time editing it, for free, is more likely to grow arithmetically. There’s an incompatibility there; we could play whack-a-mole with mistakes forever.
3. The kinds of financial returns available online aren’t conducive to thorough destination research, at the moment and for the most part anyway. Patrick Smith has documented the UK launch of Demand Media on his blog, and the pay for experts at leading travel portals isn’t significantly better. (Not because those running such sites are rapacious capitalists; far from it. They’re professional outfits that have done the maths and worked out what a page is worth in traffic and click-through revenue.)
4. Visitors to travel sites are seeking information, inspiration and enlightenment. They don’t know; that’s why they’re there. They aren’t equipped to spot errors (a classic adverse selection problem).
5. When it comes down to it, why should we spend time correcting the errors of content creators who can’t even be bothered to check Wikipedia? (Even to read the Battle of Stamford Bridge, paragraph one.) If it’s your job (or your hobby) to provide quality, well-sourced travel information, then do your job. Visitors to your site aren’t there to correct your errors, and readers are generally not likely to help people with such cavalier attitudes to quality.
6. There’s just far too much information out there, much of it contradictory, much of it abandoned by its creator, and most of it easy to find with the right search term. This is an inevitable consequence of the Web’s DNA.

It strikes me as a truism that the quality of Web information available for free (or nearly-free) will improve. Algorithms will get better, the semantic Web may help push us to better quality sites. And, as Gary points out, crowdsourcing does work. We can agree on that. Individual travel sites will improve (and there are already good ones) and challenge the established names. One way some disruptors are doing so is by becoming editorially more like the traditional players.

I make a significant slice of my income writing on, or about, the Web. I use it all day, every day, and have done for over a decade. To see it as a ‘work in progress’ is to fundamentally misunderstand its nature, in my opinion. (Incidentally, some Marxists and neoconservatives make exactly that mistake with ‘history’… but that’s another subject.) I’m certainly not fixated on the professionally-produced guide as book, app, or whatever. It’s the message that’s key, not the medium. And unless I’m very wrong, the message we receive from the Internet won’t ever be ‘corrected’.

This is only a first draft of my opinion. Please feel free to use the box below to correct me.

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. I write this, partly, as an ill-informed outsider (though both a guidebook writer and journalist). For all kinds of reasons, I don’t take press trips, and only very rarely accept freebies of any kind. I find good PRs vital when I’m researching an article. But, on the whole, I’m more of a ‘pull’ user of PR than a ‘push’, and am certainly less knowledgeable about the PR business than most travel writers… and thus my general impression could be totally incorrect. I asked my question, in part, to alleviate this ignorance.

Alas, one of Twitter’s (also many) weaknesses is the transitory nature of the value it generates. Stuff just gets lost (though I use my tumblr to try and store mine, with mixed success). So, I collated some of the interesting answers I received below (some slightly edited for context). I’d suggest, as an aside, that the kind of people who take the time to answer questions like mine are the kind of people you should follow on Twitter. But that’s just my opinion, again.

Assuming equal reach, seems like the guidebook would have more shelf life, thus would more valuable – even in the medium term. @iKangaroo (also an excellent travel podcaster)

Depends on the quality of the guide or newspaper. Guides bring in more punters for longer. @MichelleChaplow

Depends on book / paper and business – different readerships. I would say, mid-range hotel or hostel = guidebook; 5 star = paper. Would also say resorts reliant on package tourism are better in a paper. Most attractions, tours, restaurants probably better in a guidebook. And another point (the one we don’t like to talk about): If it’s in the book, it’s far more likely to be picked up & used in a paper.  @mrdavidwhitley (also an excellent travel blogger)

This is a guess – guidebook. People keep it and use it again and again. Paper may cause a spike but it’ll pass. @lemondrizzle

Newspaper, assuming it also publishes online. Search engine possibilities plus (with most) higher potential readership. Paper with, say, 100k readers, c.3k likely to read travel review. Most guidebooks don’t sell that, and few are read cover to cover. @Nosemonkey (also an excellent EU politics blogger)

That would depend on the demographic of the paper and the circulation of the guidebook for starters… but the paper possibly attracts a new customer base. @lsdscuba

I would think papers make you more findable (online) during planning – but guidebooks make you more visible once there. @evaapp

I think one interesting aspect about a guidebook is that you probably have it to hand at precisely the moment when you’re booking. Or, better still, at the precise moment you’re hungry. (Eating is more spur-of-the moment than a hotel reservation, usually.) Of course, that doesn’t really work for ‘destination’ hotels and eateries. Luxury probably works better in the colour supplement of your weekend paper. Even if that paper is flying through the ether to your iPad.

If I get any more replies via Twitter, I’ll keep the post updated. Do feel free to add comments below.

Some more that came via Twitter:

Add that many newspaper journos doing round-up pieces source material from the guidebooks, and guides live on in libraries. @melissashales

Depends what type of tourism business you are I’d say: on location attraction = guidebook; flights/hotels = newspaper @keeling

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.

The opportunities for LP–BBC print cross-promotion are blatant enough. Shiny new Lonely Planet Magazine‘s launch issue featured a story by Stephen Fry, that tied in with his fine …in America book and series. The second issue has David Attenborough in “The land that time forgot“, the Galapagos. I wonder how easy a non-BBC subsidiary would find it to commission a travel feature from either of those two. Unlike, say, Top Gear Magazine, this is a market segment in which the BBC had zero presence until November 2007.

As I predicted in my previous piece, both issues have been light on advertising. In rotten market conditions, Lonely Planet Magazine has an ace up its sleeve: BBC magazines are able to buy market share by taking a hit on profitability, in the short term at least. Strategies like that aren’t so readily available to small commercial players like Wanderlust.

But these advantages are trivial compared to the online expertise that Lonely Planet has bought into. The BBC runs the best news website in the world, at our expense. Three BBC Online experts were sent to LP’s Melbourne HQ immediately after that 2007 acquisition. The latest marketing wheeze, launched yesterday, is a travel module integrated inside BBC.com that provides access directly and exclusively into Lonely Planet hosted content (via). When it comes to social media, these digital marketeers know where the online travel information market is going:

Users will also be able to click through to the Lonely Planet site to discover a range of content and tools to plan, book and share travel experiences.

The feature is geo-coded, of course, and so only visible to overseas viewers. Oh, and any UK nationals who check BBC.com for the footie results when they’re on holiday. In any case, the idea that growing the worldwide brand power of Lonely Planet could fail to distort the domestic travel information market is naive. The 26m readers of BBC.com are being corralled into Lonely Planet for their travel information, at the expense of other UK-owned and -sited travel portals, among them struggling startups.

The travel guidebook market is worth something like £100m in UK retail book sales alone. Quite where the online market for travel information is going, nobody quite knows. But it’s safe to assume it can only grow. And with the massive, unfair advantage of BBC Online know-how behind it, taxpayers’ help in effect, it’s likely that Lonely Planet will shout so loud that other UK players barely get heard. Innovators with shallower pockets will be trampled or deterred from entering in the first place. Is this really what the BBC is for?

First published here.

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.

Time Out founder Tony Elliott says he fears that the BBC will provide Lonely Planet with “an inexhaustible fund of factual, technical and editorial information and expertise quite beyond the resources of any privately funded organisation such as Time Out”.

Complaints along these lines haven’t gone away. This week Lyn Hughes, publisher of Wanderlust, accused the BBC of deliberately targeting her long-running, independent travel magazine, undercutting ad rates and planning a launch issue of Lonely Planet Magazine to coincide with Wanderlust’s 100th:

I would question why any travel magazine would be launching at this time. Our advertisers are finding it tough. … No other magazine publisher would be launching a travel magazine at this time. They’d be completely daft. … Why is the BBC launching one at the worst possible time? I can only think they’re smug. They don’t need to make money.

She’s right at least on the emboldened point. The predictable consensus at this year’s World Travel Market, which ended yesterday, was that 2009 would be tough for the business. No sane publisher would launch a print travel mag right now. But as its 2007/8 results showed, the BBC can afford to buy increased top-line magazine sales in return for decreased profits. Further, the recently relaunched (and rather lovely) Lonely Planet website is very much a commercial concern, with click-through sales, destination advertising, custom-publishing client solutions and plenty else on offer. They announced plans yesterday to pay amateur travel bloggers for content, from February 2009, on a revenue-sharing basis using Google AdWords. There’s no doubt, surely, that BBC experience in running the world’s best news website has given LP an edge here. (Three BBC online experts were sent to LP’s Melbourne HQ immediately after the acquisition.) So, expertise gained at our expense is being used to give LP a competitive edge in the domestic market. This is the very essence of distorting that market, and dangerous territory for the BBC. So, who is it that wants to “privatize” the BBC now? Cameron and the Conservatives? Or the BBC itself? Our state-funded monolith has the freedom, via its effective sub-brand Lonely Planet, to also operate as a 100% commercial entity in the UK. Not only can’t that be right; it ultimately can’t be good for the BBC.

First published at Liberal Conspiracy.

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. First stop, Renaissance Florence, for which you’ll need a little background on patronage. You won’t often read that it was the ‘government’ of the city-state that commissioned and paid for such-and-such a painting. If it isn’t a religious order, the name on the contract is usually a Medici. The Medici were the government. They ran the city and taxed as they saw fit; they contracted and extracted, meddled and tinkered, in everything from the design of palazzi to the precise composition of works that appear to us the product of one artist’s genius. It wasn’t unusual for them to insist their kids appeared prominently, or insert their family saints. The grovelling tone of a letter from Fra’ Filippo Lippi to his public–private patron reproduced in this book shows just how much had to be approved, how often the Dead Hand of the client was holding the brush too.

Of course, the great Tuscan artists didn’t work only for the state. Giotto’s triumph was a private job (though he later freeloaded off the people of Naples). Piero Della Francesca did his best work for the Bacci family, but also served as a town councillor; Masaccio for the Carmelites.

Andrea Mantegna, the greatest painter to hail from that flat bit between the Apennines and the Alps, would have found himself even lower down in libertarian esteem. He did more than just cash the odd cheque from Mantua’s ruling Gonzaga dynasty; he worked for them. He was a waged bureaucrat, who according to Evelyn Welch even managed to cadge himself a bit of woodland.

The same pattern is repeated in Northern Europe. From 1512 until his death in 1528, engraver and painter Albrecht Durer made a living scrounging a stipend from the epileptic Emperor Charles V. Instead of going out to find a proper job, he studied Humanism and perspective – as well as Bellini, Leonardo and Mantegna. The waster. Roger Van Der Weyden sponged off the people of Brussels; Burgundian public money supported Van Eyck in Bruges.

But for sheer meddlesome bureaucracy, we need to rewind a couple of centuries and head back to Tuscany. Siena in the 1300s was a civic, republican culture that both nurtured and was nurtured by public art. Almost all funding came from The Nine, elected burghers who ruled the city for one (relatively) enlightened century until the Black Death. Gothic creativity blossomed, in painting and architecture. Forget the Sistine Chapel, Siena’s medieval town hall is the greatest site of public art on the planet – precisely because Simone Martini’s 1315 Maesta and Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government was conceived of as public art. Reminders, frescoed on the walls of the council chamber, of the essence of good politics, which for medieval Sienese included justice, trade, concord and cross-dressing dancers in the piazza.

There’s no ducking it: this art wouldn’t exist without state funding. It was paid for by the people of Siena. In any case, at any reasonable estimate of the discount rate, the Sienese have got their money back. Never mind that there’s a world of costs and benefits that we haven’t worked out how to count, yet.

So, where am I going with all this? Here: that there’s a tendency on the ‘free market right’ to think that public choice theory describes the world, rather than just provides a frame in which to sketch bits of it. Say I suggest that the US’s overdependence on private arts funding only produced Regus meeting room pap like abstract expressionism. Or propose the absence of any British art of merit between the Wilton Diptych and JMW Turner for the same reason. Or that it’s the Pre-Raphaelites‘ commitment to art as a public good that makes them the only British movement worth the name. And so on. The world doesn’t work like that. It isn’t that deterministic. Or simplistic: causes and effects, measurable and unmeasurable, public and private, aren’t distinctions that can easily be made when it comes to art. Great art, anyway.

So –

Q1: Is the State’s hand really all that Dead?

Q2: Should we fund the arts?

A: It depends.

First posted at Liberal Conspiracy.