Groupize, a booking engine for large hotel room blocks
Groupize is a new travel industry tool. It’s a hotel booking engine. So what, right? Its cool trick is booking blocks of up to 25 rooms at a time, which no other hotel booking engine does at present. Awesome if you’re a wedding planner… and the UX is nice.
Facebook is making another design change. This time it’s to Facebook Pages, which are bread & butter for the social marketing community. This post on spottedsun.com has the skinny.
Microsoft, partnering with the government of the Balearic Islands, has established an innovation center specifically for tourism (site is in Spanish). The Balearics are an out of the way place to do this, but it’ll be interesting to see if this yields any fruit for the travel industry.
O’Reilly Radar post on the state of APIs and the directions in which they’re currently developing. As a web app guy, I found the bit about using APIs to drive analytics particularly interesting.
And one more Facebook-related article… This piece from Fast Company describes (puportedly) leaked internal Facebook documents that describe their future vision for online ads. Briefly, it looks like they want to drop display advertising completely in favor of social ads that show up as conversations. Will users go for that? A few years ago I would have said “no,” but they might be on to something with the approach outlined here.
I’m currently checking out Compendium, a blogging and social media platform. It’s a nice piece of work, but what’s interesting about it is that it takes a totally different approach to blogging from the content-centric run of the mill. Instead, it analyzes your content, automatically tags your page by keywords, and then tells you if your post is sufficiently key-wordy. As a content admin, you’re encouraged to create as much content as possible in an effort to saturate your chosen keywords with links to your content in search results. The tactic is a powerful one in the near to mid term, but what does it do to search results over time?
What’s happened on the corporate side of the blogosphere is interesting. We create content for the sake of raising keyword relevance. I haven’t found a lot of competitors to C0mpendium (I’m looking for them, to compare), but I have a strong feeling their approach will become widespread. Will search engines respond? If every company that can afford it uses high-relevance blog posts to brush aside things like Yelp reviews, will they change their algorithms in response?
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Augspace is growing!
Today, Shareable.net ran Five Ways Augmented Reality Is Making Your Life More Shareable, part one of two guest posts I wrote on augmented reality. Part one focuses on present day AR applications. Part two (running tomorrow) speculates on applications we could see over the next two decades.
These posts are part of a series called Shareable Futures. The other guest posters include science fiction luminaries such as Corey Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Paolo Bacigalupi. I highly recommend checking out their posts, too.
