Travel Bloggers Speak-Up

MR. RANDY PETERSEN: I'll go in for a second. Actually, Flyertalk.com takes a little bit different angle on the idea of blogging. I think that today it seems to be that blogging is only about a singular voice, a singular post, a singular bandwidth. But Flyertalk.com is really -- it kind of harks back to the start of the internet and public bulletin boards where the voice comes across as the voice of two people, 200 people or 2,000 people that take a particular topic, a travel topic. Right now what's hot is liquid gel bans on airlines. In the case of Flyertalk.com, on a couple of threads there are may be, I don't know, 1,000 different people creating a thread about that particular topic fueled by, I don't know, 100,000 other people, if you will. At Flyertalk it's not to create a blog that's a single voice, mind you, but a merged voice of many different people..

I think sometimes we get carried away with the idea of a blog's individual stuff and we forget the precursory blog and the community voice, which I honestly still think is valuable today and shouldn't be thought of as the old-fashioned way of blogging, that the community voice actually is a fairly more well-balanced voice, if you will.

Joshua David Stein, Randy Petersen, Erik Olsen, Mark G. Johnson, and moderator Erik Torkells [enlarge photo] BUDGET TRAVEL BLOG PARTY • Learn more about the travel bloggers • From the Editor: Finding Useful Travel Blogs • Travel Blog Directory • Five DIY Travel Blog Websites

MR. JOHNSON: Absolutely, and that's what we are trying to do, and when we started HotelChatter.com one of the reasons was that I spent a lot of time on Trip Advisor, which has many, many different voices and millions of different reviews, and I just spent so many hours on there that I was wishing there was a filter or a lens that I could look at this through. So I think that's what we're trying to add and to build on, the forefathers, if you will, of travel bulletin boards.

MR. TORKELLS: Well, that leads to an interesting question. One of our readers -- Lola, from New York -- and I was heartened to see this question because I was going to ask it, but it's nice that it came from someone else. It's: "How do you feel about user-generated content?" I mean, we all use it, but the follow-up question to that was, "Can we trust just anyone or do we need a voice with more authority? Is the future of the internet all about empowering Americans by giving them all a voice? How will this affect the travel industry specifically?"

MR. OLSEN: I think that eventually everybody ends up going to, you know, a series of bookmarks, places they know that they can go to, they depend on for, what is, really when it comes down to it, an edited voice. User-generated content is dynamite, and we're going in that direction. We've hired people who are going out on trips to go ahead and blog about those trips, and yet they still go through us. That is, they go through me and I'm going to make sure that, "Okay, well, you need to do this. You can't do just whatever you want."

So, as far as the kind of stuff we do, which I think is more editorial in a way, more magazine feature-ish, for lack of a better term, you do need some editorial filter. But the contribution of other people is utterly necessary as well, or at least it's utterly beneficial and it gives a sense of community in the sense of people contributing who are out there and you don't have the voice-of-God-control over everything, which is why a lot of people have this feeling -- why they don't like mass media so much, because they feel like there's too much control. So, it's not quite anarchy, but it's in the middle somewhere.

MR. TORKELLS: Gridskipper has been doing interesting things with its commenters recently in terms of trying to filter them a little bit. Can you talk about some of the decisions, about how you got the idea of that?

MR. STEIN: Well, Gridskipper.com is part of the Gawker dynasty, and I think a lot of the comments are just so wildly clever and witty. And on the travel website it works as well, but you also need to have people who aren't posting just to be witty. You want people who are interested in building a community and also giving helpful tips and not just to run off snarky little bits of -- I don't know what it is. So, yeah, we changed the commenting system where pretty much anyone can comment. But it is a very important thing.

We get a fair amount of our posts from tips which people send in, which we then follow up on and kind of make sure aren't lame. Anyone can comment, and as an editor, I kind of filter out the dregs or the non-visceral, non-witty folk.

MR. TORKELLS: In my humble moderator-type opinion, a big part of this problem is anonymity. I mean, when people have that cloak they use it defensively. Do you trust your anonymous contributors less?

MR. STEIN: Yes. We have a rather large team of contributors who, you know, their names are on the masthead. They have ownership of the site, and you know that what they are contributing is quality. And then you have a lot of people who just say, "Oh, well, I went to this restaurant, it was great Mexican food in Austin" -- but it was probably not the case. It might be the case, but it definitely warrants more investigative journalism on behalf of Gridskipper.com.

MR. TORKELLS: Have any of you encountered public relations people trying to plant stuff?