PlanetEye

Travel Beyond Words

Archive for October, 2008

Friday, October 31st, 2008

Tutorial: Personalize PlanetEye

Mark Evans
Director, Community

Over the past few months, PlanetEye has evolved and improved as we strive to become the leading online travel planning destination.

As we introduce new features and make our flagship planning tool, the Travel Pack, even more useful, one of the things we want to provide is a series of tutorials so you can get the most out of PlanetEye.

One of the PlanetEye’s most valuable and effective tools are the personalized recommendation and content generated about the top-rated restaurants, attractions, hotels and activities.

These recommendations and content are a great way to discover and learn about places that you may have never heard of otherwise. It’s the kind of information that can help make a good trip great by simply going to the right places that meet your interests.

It’s easy to personalize PlanetEye using two tools: Trusted Sources and Travel Interests.

Trusted Sources consist of editorial content that offers valuable insight and information. This includes content from the New York Times, Conde Nast, Wine Spectator, GridSkipper, OpenTable and Golf Digest. You pick the kind of content you would like to see, and if it’s available, it will appear when you’re looking at a particular place on PlanetEye.

For example, you could be interested in Il Pagliaccio, a great restaurant in Rome. If you had selected the New York Times as one of your content choices, you would see a review if you visited the Il Pagliaccio place page.

Travel Interests let you select the kind of places where you like to stay (e.g. hotels, B&Bs, hostels or rentals), where you like to eat (restaurants, fast food), and what you like to do (attractions, art, wine and activities).

To configure your Trusted Sources and Travel Interests, go to your PlanetEye profile. Click on “Set Travel Interests” and starting personalizing your PlanetEye.

Personalize

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Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Better Blogs with Microformats

Juan Gonzalez
Vice President, Technology

Knowing that original and recent reviews written by local bloggers would help us establish relevancy on the places for each one of our featured cities, we invited around 50 professional travel writers to produce content for PlanetEye. To keep things nicely integrated into the rest of our site we gave these Local Experts tools not only to write but associate their posts to specific places on the map. This helps the reader understand context and allows us to create a relationship to the article from the place referenced. This has worked really well so far: our collective pool of Local Experts have written over 3,500 articles, 50% of which are associated with a place.

So for example while a review with proper references to location would look like this:

The featured place, in this case a restaurant, would have the proper reference to the original post:

We realize our Local Experts are not the only people with a professional opinion on destinations around the world. We’ve come across hundreds of bloggers that feature terrific content. They all have unique methodologies to scout their cities looking for great destinations, they all are diligent about documenting location and other important information as well as writing a great review. Mapplr.com comes to mind as a good example.

We would love to integrate the wisdom of these reviews in the same way we have done so for our Local Experts: by creating a relationship between their review and the places they are talking about in such a way that the aggregation of this information can create a more interesting profile of a city.

To make this happen, we are endorsing Microformats and have put together a white paper that explains our suggested approach to implement them when writing hotel or restaurant reviews. It contains very simple instructions to get started producing structured content.

Already this month has been an interesting one for Microformats with the launch of Oomph, Microsoft’s Microformats Toolkit and enhanced Firefox support.

Download the white paper.

Dowload the White Paper

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

New Release – Search Enhancements

Adam Bullied
Director, Product Management

We rolled out a new product release this week that offers a major enhancement to our search functionality. I wanted to provide some background on how you can now use search to effectively browse PlanetEye to find what you are looking for.

Keyword Searches

If you decide the suggestions provided within the search box as you type aren’t offering exactly what you are looking for, you can click on the search button to see a complete set of results.

This looks for matches across multiple types of information on PlanetEye. Of course, any matching cities, hotels, restaurants and attractions are provided – but so are Travel Packs that contain what you are searching for in their title, description or place within them.

This means you can find travel plans created by other PlanetEye members that you can take inspiration from, and also copy to your account and use as the basis for planning your own trips.

In addition, local expert articles that include what you are searching within their title or the article itself will also be featured in the results.

Let’s look at a quick example. If you search for Chicago, you will see results in all three areas of the page – destinations, Travel Packs and Local Experts.

Within the destinations, you will find places with the word “Chicago” in the name. This could be the actual city, but also a hotel (the W Chicago – Lakeshore) or an attraction (the Art Institute of Chicago).

SearchResultsScreenshot.jpg

The second area within the results will feature all of the Travel Packs throughout PlanetEye that have Chicago in the name, description or include it as a destination within the Travel Pack itself.

TravelPackSearchResult.jpg

The Local Experts results feature great articles our writers have created that mention Chicago. For example, Abha Malpani’s article on Anticafe Madrid mention the keyword Chicago, and thus appears within the search results.

LocalExpertSearchResult.jpg

Address Search

We recognize that when you’re exploring a new destination, searching by address can be difficult. However, you may know the address of the place you want to go, but have a difficult time finding what’s around it.

Using our new search capabilities, it’s easy to look for a specific location and then find nearby hotels or restaurants. For example, if you search for the White House (1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500) you can then discover all of the things in the area to do before or after checking out where the President spends his days.

AddressSearchResult.jpg

We are always looking for ways to make our product better. If you have a suggestion, frustration, or general comment you can reach me by e-mail: adam [at] planeteye [dot] com.

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Google Earth on the iPhone

Juan Gonzalez
Vice President, Technology

Google Earth is now available on the iPhone. You can watch a short video demonstrating the main features at the Google Lat Long Blog and read some first impressions by other reviewers such as ReadWriteWeb.

While the level of interactivity is very much as sophisticated as it is on the desktop, even enhanced by the iPhone’s multi-touch interface, long time users of the original Google Earth will miss the features that have made this application a favourite of the geo-enthusiasts: using your own data.

The iPhone version of the application includes the Wikipedia and Panoramio layers, but doesn’t support any means to visualize data sets defined in other KMLs. Surely this feature would make this application very valuable for companies with large and complex sets of GeoData that needs to be taken to the streets.

It is obvious that deploying advanced mapping applications will soon stop being an issue about maps and will become a much more challenging visualization issue. With reduced screen size, the mechanisms to ensure users gain access to large volumes of data with ease, become an important problem.

No wonder Google opted to enable only a couple of layers even though their desktop application has a large number of unique layers available. But what to do when a screen of 480×320 must display a map that contains hundreds, if not thousands of data points? At PlanetEye these are the challenges that we believe deserve attention.

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Monday, October 27th, 2008

Travel Pack Spotlight: London’s Best Pubs

Mark Evans
Director, Community

Travel Pack: London’s Best Pubs
Description: London is chock-a-block with great places to see such as Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, the National Museum and Westminster Abbey.

It’s also home to many of the world’s best and oldest pubs. Fancyapint.com did a survey of the best ones in London, which we used to create this Travel Pack:

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Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Travel Pack Spotlight: Traditional Irish Pubs

Mark Evans
Director, Community

Stag's Head
Travel Pack: The Top 10 Traditional Pubs in Ireland

Description: The traditional Irish pub – located in Ireland as opposed to all those knockoffs with Irish names – is gradually disappearing. This inspired award-winning writer Turtle Bunbury to go on a cross-country pub crawl involving all 32 counties to find the best ones.

Bunbury and James Fennell recently had their book, The Irish Pub, published by Thames & Hudson.

You can read more about the top-10 list in the Guardian.

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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Travel Pack Spotlight

Mark Evans
Director, Community

The Travel Pack is PlanetEye’s flagship travel planning tool. It’s a great way to organize trips by letting you collect the interesting places (hotels, restaurants, attractive, activities and photos) found on PlanetEye.

To highlight the Travel Pack and some of the ways you can use it, we’re going to put the spotlight on new and interesting Travel Packs that have been created.


Travel Pack: The Best Spas in Las Vegas

Description: There is more to Las Vegas than just gambling. For people looking to relax, Las Vegas has a wide variety of luxurious spas. This Travel Pack features a list of the best spas put together by Kathika.com.

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008


Moments in the Life of a Cultural Navigator

Mark Evans
Director, Community

Kazakh Gallery Ontheglobe (16)-4

One of the more interesting trends within the travel landscape in recent years has been the growing interest in destinations off the beaten path such as Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Kazakhstan.


Andrew Princz, a well-known travel writers who’s also PlanetEye’s local expert for Budapest, recently visited Kazakhstan. He was good enough to provide his thoughts on the country, as well as provide some photographs by Anna J. Kutor.


When your job title is Cultural Navigator – which includes being thrown into a slew of cultural experiences in far-flung lands, and then adapting to them as fast as lightening – life has some glorious moments.


Take the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan, one of the world’s lesser known areas but a stupendously beautiful place. It had me skipping at least one heartbeat.

It was here that I recently lived one of these euphoric moments at Charyn Canyon, some 200 km east of Almaty, not far from the Chinese border. It was a brief visit to the top of the world, as my colleague Anna described it.

A group of about 20 of us boarded an impressive looking bird of a helicopter whose throbbing clatter mounted intensely until after a gentle nudge, and we slowly became airborne, floating over the sometimes unforgiving and vast Kazakh landscapes.

We took turns peaking out of the small rounded window that stayed open as we soared over snow-capped mountains, lush green forests, arid flatlands, the Azur-blue Kolsay Lake and our destination – smack on top of Charyn Canyon overlooking the place that is sometimes called the ‘Valley of the Castles’.

Our hosts gave us a boxed lunch, as we happily ate overlooking the impressive gorges. Moments like these make adventuring worthwhile: I was at home here, if only for a moment. But what a moment.

Kazakhstan – isolated from tourism for decades during its Soviet years – is now coming out of the woodwork. While it may have been put on the map by the famous or infamous film Borat, Kazakhstan has nothing to do with the strange character’s misspoken words.

This country’s capital Astana is a jewel of modernity, being propped up by the country’s vast oil-wealth. In multi-coloured Astana, sky-piercing high-rise buildings are mushrooming everywhere and cranes permeate the landscape.

We also ventured south to the cities of the ancient Silk Road. Little of the vestiges of this trading route remains – the fault of both ancient invading armies, and more recently culturally derelict Soviet minds.
But you will find mosques and mausoleums. Most notably in the otherwise nondescript settlement of Turkistan at the 14th century Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, a pilgrimage site.

Some say that this is the second most holy place in Islam after Mecca, and three pilgrimages here are equivalent to one pilgrimage to Mecca.

Here I woke up at sunrise for another cathartic moment as hundreds of wailing birds circled the holy site – paying their daily visit. Perhaps, a pilgrimage of their own. We were at home. We had made our pilgrimage.

Montreal-based travel journalist, broadcaster and cultural navigator Andrew Princz is the editor of the travel portal ontheglobe.com. Andrew is involved in country awareness and tourism promotion projects globally. He will speak on various destinations in his forthcoming series Travels OnTheGlobe.

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Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

FireFox 3.1 – Geode

Alan
Swiss-Army Developer

Firefox 3.1 is around the corner, and with it comes some features that are particularly interesting to PlanetEye.

Geode is Firefox’s implementation of the W3C Geolocation Specification. Specifically, this allows the browser to let a Web site to know its current location. This opens all kinds of possibilities as we can provide location based services to regular browsers without the user having to enter their location.

Currently, Firefox 3.1 beta provides hooks for inputting geo coordinates. Plugins can be created to get this data from a USB GPS receiver, the GPS chip in a phone, or even Skyhook. Of course, desktop users can also easily set their location manually.

Given that Firefox Mobile will likely be on devices in 2009, this lets developers provide the same level of location services to users on a mobile browser as the browser can now relay the user’s location. Before, developers needed to write a standalone application to take advantage of a phone’s GPS features, which is a daunting task given the number of mobile platforms.

With the phone’s Web browser able to provide geo-coordinates, companies will have the option to write a single Web-based mobile app instead of separate standalone ones for each mobile platform.

This shift won’t happen overnight, but much like the transition that happened with desktop to Web-based applications, one of the last barriers to geo apps on mobile has been lifted. Mobile is still a rapidly changing landscape but the future is looking bright for location based apps.

Monday, October 20th, 2008

Kudos from American Way

Mark Evans
Director, Community

American Way
Over the past few months, it has been particularly gratifying to see PlanetEye attract a growing amount of media coverage. It’s always a much-appreciated thing as we continue to work on offering the leading online travel planning destination.

In the latest issue of American Way, the in-flight magazine of American Airlines, PlanetEye is mentioned as one the “Websites We Love”.

More coverage and information about PlanetEye can be found on our media section.

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