TV Ads Equal Online Sales For Travelocity

If you want to sell more products online, buy some TV time, concludes Jeffrey Glueck, chief marketing officer for Internet travel agency Travelocity. The site is upping its TV ad budget to encourage travelers to search out its name rather than generic terms, such as "discount travel" or "Hawaii vacation."

Glueck says "the dirty little secret to search [engine advertising] is you make money buying your own brand name, but on generic terms, the clicks are more expensive and the return is low." So to get those customers to search his company out by brand name, he does more TV advertising, although Glueck declines to say by how much.

Last year, the company spent one-third of its $85.2 million budget on TV, according to TNS Media Intelligence, but through the first six months of 2006, that is up to half. At the same time, while Travelocity is still on target to spend the same online in 2006 as it did in 2005, it cut newspaper spending 33% and radio buys 67% in the first six months of this year. -

TravelCLICK, VFM Interactive sign exclusive agreement

October 25, 2006

TravelCLICK Inc. has signed an exclusive agreement with VFM Interactive to market Viz-it, a rich digital media content management solution designed to distribute rich media across electronic channels and enhance the online consumer experience.

A report by Harris Interactive indicates that more than two-thirds of online travelers rate visuals as one of the most important buying factors for consumers choosing a hotel online. And, according to another study for the travel industry, rich media click rates are typically five times higher than those for non-rich media(1).

Viz-it works synergistically with TravelCLICK's iStay booking engine, which is designed to optimize hotel merchandising through an enhanced Flash- based user interface. Part of the iHotelier central reservation system, iStay provides a highly graphical, integrated shopping and booking experience using a variety of rich media, including compelling photographs, floor plans and 360-degree room views as well as VFM's Premium Video and Photovideo Tours (videos created from existing image assets).

"Visual content that communicates the guest experience is a powerful conversion tool. It's a must-have for hotels that want to differentiate themselves, particularly independent properties that are trying to build their brand positions," said TravelCLICK Senior Vice President Scott Farrell. "With VFM's advanced digital content management and distribution platform, TravelCLICK provides hotels with the power and flexibility to create a consistent visual brand identity across all targeted distribution channels."

TravelCLICK hotel clients now will be able to leverage digital media well beyond their own websites. Viz-it's web-based management and distribution tool provides a single-source solution for media management and distribution, allowing properties to control media distribution through the GDS, Pegasus Online Distribution Database, search engines and more than 20,000 travel sites including Travelocity, Orbitz, Trip Advisor and Apple Vacations. And, making use of a unique feature of VFM's platform, TravelCLICK customers can selectively control exactly where specific media appears across the Internet.

"The exclusive partnership between VFM and TravelCLICK will provide hoteliers with a unique merchandising advantage," said Paolo Boni, President and Chief Executive Officer of VFM Interactive. "By combining our rich digital media solutions with TravelCLICK's powerful iStay booking engine, we are able to deliver an unsurpassed online customer experience. We are working closely with TravelCLICK to explore all the ways rich media can be used to create mind share among online consumers, market incremental services and increase revenue for its hotel customers."

Related Link: TravelClick

Mapvertising: Getting from Point A to Point Brand

October 25, 2006

Online mapping continues to evolve rapidly offering richer and more detailed graphics such as satellite photos, deeper interactivity and programming flexibility. Major players are still adding and testing features (Microsoft's Windows Life Local is still in beta form).

Sometimes referred to as Neogeography, individuals are creating exciting map mash-ups where they mix maps with other content and information. One recent example from Japan brought together an annual event with the Internet. Individual users overlaid blog information about the best places to see Cherry Blossoms onto online maps.

Effective mapvertising comes down to interactivity - display ads will be necessary and useful, but as the the lines blur between maps, blogs, wikis, and social networks the key to reaching users is cater to and engage with the communities. Mapvertising is an area for marketers to continue to explore and cultivate.

Get the full report from Universal McCann (PDF 940KB)

Reuters' 'Second Life' reporter talks shop

Adam Pasick, in-world correspondent, opens up about how to cover the virtual world and why the news agency is there.

 

By Daniel Terdiman  Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: October 26, 2006, 4:00 AM PDT

newsmakers On Oct. 16, Reuters opened its first all-digital bureau, a building in the virtual world "Second Life" modeled on its New York and London offices.

Almost immediately, news agencies around the world picked up on the story, intrigued by the fact that one of the oldest existing news outlets would choose to station Adam Pasick, a full-time reporter, in an entirely virtual environment.

For its part, Reuters is using the bureau to disseminate its real-world news feeds to "Second Life" residents, hoping in the process to find a new audience.

Reuters is not the only news outlet to hang a shingle in "Second Life." In fact, CNET had previously opened a "Second Life" bureau and has been using the virtual space as a venue for interviewing luminaries from the technology community.

Still, the fact that Reuters--which is better known for financial and business reporting than for culture coverage--decided to set up shop in " Second Life" is noteworthy.

My parents love it now. They have avatars and hang out in the Reuters building.

Known in-world as Adam Reuters, Pasick is new to covering virtual worlds. ( "Second Life" enables corporate clients to purchase their company's name as a last name for employees' avatars.) But as a seasoned Internet reporter, he is approaching the assignment as he would any new gig.

On Monday, Pasick visited CNET's "Second Life" bureau and sat down for an interview in front of an audience of about 40, during which he talked about many of the issues facing a reporter in such a different kind of environment.

Q: This has been a pretty exciting week or so for you, I'm guessing. What has it been like?
Pasick: You could say that the reaction to our launch went way beyond anything we had expected. Now that the attention from the mainstream press is dying down a little, I'm looking forward to getting into the reporting. We thought we might make a little splash. Instead, I've been getting interview requests from Poland, Colombia, Brazil, New Zealand.

How did the Reuters bureau come about?
Pasick: The idea originally came from a conversation between our CEO, Tom Glocer, and Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale at the Sun Valley Conference earlier this year. They came to me (recently) and asked if I wanted to run the bureau.

Why you?
Pasick: I've been writing about technology and media for a while, and somehow, I've gotten the reputation within Reuters of being a bit of a geek.

Adam Pasick's
avatar

What was your initial reaction to being asked if you wanted to do this? Did you know much about "Second Life" at that point?
Pasick: I had heard of "Second Life" but never had been in-world. To be completely honest, when I first heard the idea, I was a bit dubious. But even as I talked it over that first time, I saw that it could be a great idea if done well. I think that's typical of "Second Life": The more time you spend, the more it makes sense.

From that perspective, what did you think "done well" would mean?
Pasick: Offering something useful to the community and being a learning experience for Reuters. If it was just a quick PR hit, I wouldn't have been interested. This is my full-time job. I badly want it to succeed.

So what do you see as the "mission" of Reuters in "Second Life"?
Pasick: If we can provide good financial news and data to the "Second Life" business community, and find a new audience for Reuters among "Second Life" residents, I'll be happy.

So it's as much about bringing Reuters news into "Second Life" as about sending "Second Life" news out?
Pasick: It's twofold. We bring in real-life Reuters news for those who want it, and I write stories specifically for "Second Life" residents.

How do you plan to differentiate your "Second Life" coverage from that of the many "Second Life" bloggers?
Pasick: Well, there will be a certain amount of competition. That's inevitable. But there are so many good stories, especially in the economy and business sectors that I'm focusing on. We're just getting started. We're hoping to do a lot of quantitative stories about the economy, for example. That's one area where Reuters has a lot of expertise.

What was your budget for the bureau?
Pasick: I don't know the exact figure. Luckily, I didn't have to sit through those meetings. But it was a relative drop in the bucket for a company our size.

 

How does Reuters plan to make this effort cost-effective?
Pasick: Right now, there is no direct return-on-investment calculation. We're not selling subscriptions or advertising, for example. But this has the potential to be a very valuable source of experience and exposure to a new tech-savvy community. And it's a tiny project for Reuters. I think my bosses are happy to see where it leads without having a direct source of revenue for now.

How will you and your bosses measure success in this endeavor?
Pasick: I can't give away our internal metrics for success. But broadly speaking, we're measuring visitors to Secondlife.reuters.com and use of (an in-world device that delivers Reuters news to residents). Traffic is the easiest to measure, but it's not the only yardstick we're watching. The caliber of my stories is another. So the pressure's on.

Are you expected to produce scoop after scoop?
Pasick: I'm sure they'd be ecstatic if I did. But no, I think they'll give me some time to learn the ropes.

What are some similarities you've seen between covering this stuff and a "normal" beat?
Pasick: The more time I spend in "Second Life," the more it feels like any other beat. Once you get over--or maybe embrace--the weirdness, it's much the same job: You find interesting people, read as much as you can and chase up the interesting story ideas you find.

What about some of the differences?
Pasick: We've had to do a bit of work adapting the Reuters editorial guidelines to deal with the fact that avatars are anonymous vis-a-vis their real-life identities. I know it breaks the metaphor a bit, but I ask people to provide their real-life identities. Not everyone wants to, and that's their right. I also take into account the reputation that is built up over time in "Second Life." I'm much more likely to trust a quote from someone who's been there awhile.

"Second Life" has gotten a lot of positive press. But there are also many issues that call for critical coverage. It is a business with all kinds of problems. What do you see as some of those?
Pasick: I think I'll gracefully pass on that one. If I have a story, you'll have to wait until I publish.

Well, how about broad topics?
Pasick: OK. Property rights. Contract law. And scalability issues.

How do you explain your new beat to friends, family and colleagues who don't understand what "Second Life" or virtual worlds are?
Pasick: I've had a lot of practice. But I've found the best way is to get them in front of a computer and show them. My parents love it now. They have avatars and hang out in the Reuters building.

Gabriel Riiser (from the audience) asks: There was a Slashdot article recently about several builders of virtual worlds, like Matt Mihaly (CEO of Achaea, published by Iron Realms Entertainment), who are criticizing "Second Life" and Linden Lab for being too much about PR and not enough about the quality of the world itself. What's your take, Adam?
Pasick: I think I'm going to use that old reporter's dodge--which happens to be true--and say that I think I'll report the facts and leave the opinions to smarter people.

But surely, you must have noticed that Linden Lab is rather adept at PR?
Pasick: Well, you don't get to a million registered avatar names by being dumb.

Liv Kamloops (from the audience) asks: Do you see "Second Life" becoming an interactive version of the Internet?
Pasick: This question probably has the potential to make me sound like an idiot. However, I think it makes a lot of sense for there to be a 3D successor to the Internet, and "Second Life" looks like the best candidate at the moment.

Why do you think it's the best candidate?
Pasick: It's a relatively open platform, with content created by users and which is non-game-based. It makes sense that some virtual 3D world or worlds is going to be what's next. Maybe it's "Second Life." Who knows? We wouldn't be here if we didn't think it was a possibility.  

Travel Mags: Show Me the Sunny

LIKE FOOD MAGAZINES, TRAVEL TITLES are also showing staying power in the face of Internet competition. It's hard to know for sure, but like food magazines, their vitality may have something to do with their target markets. High-end readers who actually use the magazines to plan vacations are obviously a desirable demo. Meanwhile, readers who use the mags aspirationally, for vicarious getaways, may simply get more pleasure from luxuriant photo essays about the jet-setting good life than online directories of travel agencies or Web booking services--which still tend to have a utilitarian, stripped-down feel.

Indeed, it's worth noting the travel mags that are still succeeding are all unabashed purveyors of "travel porn"--heavy on photos, with a typical spread juxtaposing private cabana-mansions and their crystal-clear swimming pools against the backdrop of the turquoise sea beyond. With this kind of content, Conde Nast Traveller has seen newsstand sales rise 8.7% while subscriptions remained basically flat with a 0.2% increase, according to the most recent FAS-FAX report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) covering January-June 2006. Meanwhile, compared to January-September of last year, in the first nine months of 2006 ad pages rose 6% and revenue jumped 11.1% to $102.5 million, according to the Publishers Information Bureau (PIB).

Travel + Leisure, a property of the American Express Publishing Group, is also having a good year, at least from an advertising perspective. While subs and newsstand sales were basically flat in the first half of 2006, PIB data for the year to date has ad pages rising 14% to 1,317 and revenue up 19% to $121.9 million. Like Conde Nast Traveller, Travel + Leisure doesn't stint on opulent photo spreads with high production values.

By comparison, more sensible titles aren't doing nearly as well. Despite its idyllic name, Endless Vacation is a budget travel title focusing on trips in the continental United States, paying more attention to nitty-gritty details of logistics and cost than Conde Nast Traveller and Travel + Leisure. Endless Vacation is holding its own in circulation, but its PIB figures are plummeting, with ad pages down 33.8% and revenue falling 16.6%. The equally sensible National Geographic Traveler saw subs fall 2.9%, ad pages 11.1%, and revenue 6.2%. And while Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel expanded its subscription base by 11.5% to 578,396, advertisers appear to be ambivalent, with ad pages falling 14.8% and revenue 2.1%.

There's an interesting endnote: although ABC figures aren't available, in-flight magazines are enjoying an ad boom. Although consumer titles might raise their nose at these custom publications, the basic value proposition is undeniable: of all "captive audiences," airline passengers have to be the most constrained, claustrophobic, and content-starved. In-flight personal TV on the JetBlue model may change this, but for the time being, in-flight mags are sitting pretty in the seat pocket in front of you.

According to the PIB, in January-September 2006 Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, saw ad pages and revenue both jump 37% to 851 and $42.7 million, respectively. Southwest Airlines Spirit is up 15.7% in ad pages to 1,211, and 28.3% in revenue to $37.5 million. Finally, US Airways Magazine took off in the first nine months of 2006, with ad pages up 115% to 1,193, and revenue up 46% to $33.7 million.

Destination Marketing in the age of Web 2.0

October 23, 2006 by Joseph E. Buhler

The travel industry is again undergoing radical changes in less than ten years since the first wave hit, with the introduction of the web in travel. Online travel, however it was and still is defined, in record time became the largest industry on the web.

Changes on a scale imagined only by few, have happened since and there is not one segment of the travel industry that has not been affected by that first shift to online commerce. By the end of last century it was mostly in the United States where the initial start-up companies were concentrating their efforts and where at first the phenomenal growth took place.

Today, the impact has been felt around the globe and the fastest growing regions are now Asia/Pacific and Europe, and the original online travel agencies (OTA) are players on the global stage. In the past few years they have, at least in Europe, been joined by the erstwhile written off traditional major tour operators who are now engaged in intense competition with these intruders on what many considered their turf.

Recently the new expression of the 'customer-to-customer' (C2C) marketplace was coined. This is a very apt description of what is happening today. Enabled by blogs, podcasts and social networking sites as well as other web 2.0 technology introductions the consumer today can be as informed about anything as never before in history and even more importantly, has the easy means to communicate his or her knowledge and expertise on any subject to anyone else in the world. In terms of the travel industry, everyone can become a travel agent or tour operator, or even destination marketer at least in his own mind. The ingredients and the tools are certainly at their disposal.

Companies and organizations will in future increasingly have to try and interject themselves into all the conversations going on among customers in the marketplace about their product, service or destination for that matter, rather than dominating what in the past very often was a one way communication. This new C2C reality will have a significant impact on the role of marketing in any industry. As Seth Godin, the author of some of the most innovative bestsellers on marketing, including 'Purple Cow' has said: 'Conversations among the people in your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.

The first signs of this new world of Web 2.0, which lets the audience participate in the production and distribution of content and tag it with keywords, are a number of new types of sites sprouting up such as Del.icio.us, Rojo, and Digg. In the travel space there are of course, TripAdvisor and IgoUgo, which have been around for a number of years with active communities of feedback providers. They, as well as the by now considered traditional online travel agencies, face a new type of competition from the likes of Tagzania, Gusto, Wikia, Boardingate and many more. The most important feature these sites have in common, is the ability for users to collect information and articles from sites they find of interest, add their own comments and tag them with keywords. This makes it easy for sharing with and viewing by friends or the public at large. Google Map mashups, such as MapMyHotel, are another new type of sites allowing travelers to get a detailed look of a property or attraction location and combined with personal annotations and reviews by others get a feel for the place more real and up-to-date than previously possible. In the small group and affinity travel market there is TripHub, which includes a blog for group planners. Of course there is also the 'big daddy' of sites Yahoo! They have not only acquired the meta-search company FareChase but also with their Trip Planner made some significant improvements and added Web 2.0 features to its Yahoo!Travel section. Traditional companies, such as Starwood Hotels also have embraced this new trend. Sheraton now makes customer feedback and reviews the main focus of their web presence right from the home page.

Blogs and podcasts are other developments with significant potential impact on both travel planning and the actual travel experience. Anyone with web access and some basic knowledge of computer software applications can in fact start a blog or publish a podcast, making their experience immediately available to the world at large. Combined with a RSS feed, this new user generated content is easily available for anyone with updates delivered as a free subscription.

The specific impact of Travel 2.0 on the various sectors in the travel industry is yet to be determined. What seems clear already, however, is that the role of any intermediary is being challenged even more by this user-generated content and the free flowing consumer conversations going on 24/7 on all the sites and the transparency this creates. As this web based innovations further develop and become even more user friendly than they already are today, combined with improved and integrated booking functionality the changes will be more dramatic than what we have experienced so far.

For DMO the dynamics of existing business relationships will no doubt undergo rapid and significant change. It will no longer be sufficient to maintain and develop an information rich destination website but build a platform that taps into and feeds off the sites mentioned earlier and to facilitate the dialog among past and potential future visitors. The opportunities have never been bigger to truly achieve WOM (both the mouth and mouse kind) and stimulate the buzz. What no DMO should attempt is to try and control the dialog or manage it. The mirror has never been shinier but it also has never been pointed as directly at the destination and its suppliers as it is today. Accept it, embrace change, innovate and start joining the conversation, today. The alternative is to be left behind and risk being ignored.

Joseph E. Buhler can be reached at buhlerworks

AOL Teams With Sheraton

AOL IS GETTING INTO THE hotel business--sort of. The Internet portal has created a co-branded site with Four Points by Sheraton, a budget hotel chain, that will give guests free access to AOL videos, news, music and other content. The new site is being tested at the Sheraton Manhattan Chelsea Hotel in New York before potential rollout. The co-branded site will appear as the Internet welcome page on computers in individual hotel rooms and on courtesy terminals in the lobby. In the Four Points' signature "Family Room," guests will also be able to watch AOL Video on a large TV screen connected to a PC. The partnership with Sheraton is the first time AOL has teamed up with a hotel chain to offer on-site online services.

Microsoft Teams With MTV To Push Local Search

MICROSOFT HAS TURNED TO MTV to tout its Windows Live Local Search, a new mapping and directory offering from MSN that's currently in beta testing. MTV Network's college-focused MTVu will work with Microsoft to produce the upcoming installment of "Quad Squad," a reality program in which business school students compete to create ad campaigns. The contestants of "Quad Squad"--who hail from rival schools Indiana University and the University of Illinois--will create, implement and measure marketing campaigns for Live Local Search. Live Local, which launched into beta testing in December of 2005, is MSN's local search and directory offering; it is monetized by MSN's adCenter, the company's paid search platform.

RealTravel Trip Planner: Cut, Paste & Share Travel Tips

Posted: 13 Oct 2006 03:19 AM CDT TECHCRUCH

RealTravel has come a long way since we first mentioned them in our Web 2.0 conference roundup last October. They now have very deep travel content - mostly written by users, and some from a recent partnership with Frommer's. The site has an active community of tens of thousands of frequent travelers who talk about their experiences and freely give their recommendations via blogs, forums, photos, etc.

Tomorrow RealTravel will annouce its new My Trip Plan tool, which can be found in the main navigation area. Travel content on the site includes an "add to My Trip Plan" button. Clicking this basically cuts and pastes the information into the My Trip Plan area along with a link to the original content, and this information can then be shared with others for discussion.

TripHub and Yahoo, among others, also offer good trip planning tools. RealTravel's new My Trip Planner actually falls short of those existing tools in terms of pure organizational features. However, the depth of content available from other travelers gives RealTravel a different kind of advantage. And while RealTravel can create better planning tools over time, it will be hard for competitors to compete with RealTravel's active traveling and content-creating community.

All the content on RealTravel (except the Frommer's Guide content) is drawn directly from user posts and photos that are categorized by location and type. Editors, with the help of some automated classification, and choose the cream of the crop to be featured on the site. Readers can also affect the ranking of posts by voting on them or implicity when they add the content to their trip plan. All this content populates the site's info on trip ideas, photos, blogs, dining reviews, sight reviews, useful links, and hotel reviews.

The blogging platform performs like any other blog (RSS included) except you catagorize by location and type (if it's a review or not) before you write up the entry. You can't drop drop images directly in a post, but instead associate some photos with it via an image gallery. You can print these photos out later using Qoop. Readers can comment on posts or leave questions in RealTravel's location specific forums.

RealTravel has accomplished all of this in just one year, and with only $1 million in angel funding. They are a poster-child for the way to run a lean web service, and I suspect a bigger round of financing, or acquisition, will come in the near future.

RealTravel : Technorati

tune into stations around the globe

This radio is a great one for travellers, language enthusiasts and those far away from home with a passion for radio from around the world. You'll be able to tune into thousands of stations and as the radio is digital, it'll all be crackle free. Not only that but this WiFi radio can access all your music on your PC without having to turn the computer on. Stations are listed alphabetically and you can use the preset to select up to 10 favourites. RRP £119.99

Mio H610 Personal Assistant SatNav

The Mio H610 isn't just any old personal assistant, it's a SatNav too with on foot and in car navigation with 24 European maps displayed on a 2.7 inch touch screen, a photo viewer an MP3 player with 17 hours of playback, video player, currency converters and games. Internal memory is 1GB but a SD/MMC card can add 4GB more At around the size of a pack of cards, it's definitely pocket friendly that way plus the two supplied covers are interchangeable, the one shown is a white flower design. It'll hit the shops in early November with a RRP of £269.99

Mio store locator

Acer e-Series GPS

It's not pink, but it is apparently the perfect size for our handbags (they clearly haven't seen the size of mine - I could fit a whole car in), so it can still be classed as GPS for Girls. Praise be! However, facetiousness aside, it is pretty tiny at 103 x 58.4 x 17.5 mm and weighing just 130 grams. It's also finger-friendly as opposed to stylus-stabbing, as well as loads of Points of Interests and decent maps. There's also an integrated MP3 player, and a photo viewer.

There are three models available. The e305 has UK maps and POI, the e310 has European maps, pedestrian mode and an AC-Adaptor and the e360 comes with live traffic information. Pricings yet to be released.

More car stuff: Navman F20| Hot Pink CarTrek| Barbie's

Smalltown and GrayBoxx

Smalltown and GrayBoxx: Two approaches to local search and two approaches to tapping the Yellow Pages gold mine

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

Local search and local online commerce are the next battlegrounds for the giants such as Google and Yahoo, but also for many startup companies. The lure is the billions of dollars spent on Yellow Pages advertising by local businesses.

We have Yahoo Local and Google Local, plus Max Levchin's Yelp, CitySearch, Ingenio, plus local newspapers and other companies--all trying to grab a piece of the local search and local commerce ad spend.

But tapping into the local businesses market through online services is hard. The same factors that make scaling a global online service easy on the Internet become reversed when applied to local businesses.

For example, a local pizza parlor gets nearly all its business from within two miles of where it operates. Reaching China or even a neighborhood five miles away is something the Internet does well for many companies. But it doesn't make much sense for a local pizza parlour, and the same is true for most local businesses--they all nned to reach customers in their neighborhoods.

I recently spoke with two startups, Smalltown and Grayboxx, with two different approaches.

Smalltown targets neighborhoods and small communities

I was very impressed with Smalltown's approach to local search because of the elegant design and simplicity of the site. Simplicity is not easy to do but it is extremely vital in the online space.

Last week I spoke with Smalltown CEO Hal Rucker. "To succeed in local markets we belive that you have to be local," said Mr Rucker. "So we've created 'webcards' which are a type of virtual index cards with their own web address that can be created by anyone local, by a business or an individual."

An example of a webcard:

Webcards can be attached to each other, and also sent to people. They provide an easy to use template that allows busy, small business owners to create a web page about their business without having to have a website.

And the process is simple enough that any customer of a local business can create a webcard that acts as a recommendation, or a warning, by filling in text and adding photos.

"With webcards we are helping to build what we call the 'local web.' And it creates 'social advertising,'" said Mr Rucker.

The roll out of Smalltown will be town by town. The first two are San Mateo and Burlingame, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

If they can get the formula right, then they can reproduce it in other small towns and city neighborhoods.

Each Smalltown would have a local person/agent to help evangelize the service and also aid local businesses and people to produce webcards. Smalltown is =offering cash bounties to people of $5 per five webcards, a smart way to create a large inventory of webcards, which creates a potentially useful library of local content.

SVW's take: Smalltown has a great user interface and I love the concept of webcards, each with their own web address, each discoverable through the search engines, as well as the local Smalltown portal.

What I'd like to see with such approaches is a compelling front end, by which I mean a reason to go to the site even if I'm not actively searching for something local. What would draw me to it if I did not have a need to find something? I've got a couple of ideas...

Coming up next in SVW: Interview with Bob Chandra, founder and CEO of Grayboxx (still in stealth mode). This local search startup taps unseen databases to create ranked lists of top local businesses favored by their communities. . .

Iran 'to open atomic site tours'

Iran 'to open atomic site tours'

Bushehr is scheduled to be fully operational in November 2007 Iran's president has ordered that the country's nuclear sites be opened to foreign tourists to prove its programme is peaceful, state media report. No details were given on the nature of the trips, or when they might begin. Possible attractions would include the plants at Isfahan and Natanz, or a reactor being built in Bushehr. The reported proposal comes after the UN Security Council has told Tehran to halt uranium enrichment, amid fears it is trying to build nuclear arms. Iran maintains it has a right to a nuclear programme, which it says is purely for civilian purposes. 'Peaceful' So far United Nations atomic watchdog inspectors and reporters are the only foreigners believed to have been allowed to visit the controversial sites. The head of Iran's tourism organisation said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had asked his group to study ways for tourists to see the sites, state news agency Irna reported. "This authorisation has been issued since the Iranian nuclear activities are peaceful," Esfandyar Rahim Mashaii told the agency.