Travelfilter DOA?

September 29, 2008 6:54 PM

What ever happened to Travelfilter? Is it still on the cards? I was kind of looking forward to it!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken to MetaFilter-Related at 6:54 PM (21 comments total)

It's kind of DOA.

Here's the problem. I loved travel-specific questions and how we got to link questions to a location, pull up flickr photos from that location and show you weather, etc, and group all related questions from that same area. Trip reports were icing on the cake, since we have nothing else like that anywhere.

But the main issue was if we did Travelfilter as is, we'd have to shunt all travel questions away from Ask MeFi over to Travel, and that'd kind of make Ask MeFi a little less awesome without any travel-related questions around. It'd be pulling one of the 11 categories for good and we'd have to force people to follow them on a new site and with a new feed, and for a time we considered having both travel+ask on the front page of Ask MeFi (with travel questions linked to travel.metafilter.com instead of ask.metafiler.com), but with the whole subsite we'd certainly start getting loads more travel questions at which time the front page combined would look like too much.

So we sat on the issue for a year, then eventually shut off the new questions page because some people were asking in travel but not ask and vice versa. Then we fixed a zillion bugs and built a zillion more features and a lot of the features were based on code on travel (like related ask mefi category questions, etc).

At this point we could either bring it back as trip reports only, bring it back as originally intended and gut Ask MeFi of all travel questions, or some other compromise in the middle.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:03 PM on September 29, 2008

or some other compromise in the middle.

Cross-post questions with the "travel" tag and have a single thread updated jointly from both sub-sites?
posted by felix betachat at 7:07 PM on September 29, 2008

I suppose this is somewhat what you're saying you did with the new features, but some of the above cool ideas are still not in so...

How about no sub-site at all, but on ask.mefi, when "travel" is chosen as a category, it triggers the extra features for that page like pulling from flickr, linking to other nearby travel questions, weather, etc. It'll get indexed appropriately on Google and the right people will find it without it needing to be over-emphasized.

Eventually you'll also figure out cool side material like the features you thought of for Travel for most other categories and it will just make the whole site that much more involved and complete.
posted by davebug at 7:20 PM on September 29, 2008 [4 favorites]

Cross-post questions with the "travel" tag and have a single thread updated jointly from both sub-sites?

That was my idea originally!
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:20 PM on September 29, 2008

That was my idea originally!

Obviously, you cross-posted it in my head.
posted by felix betachat at 7:23 PM on September 29, 2008

Still room for GigFilter at MeFi Music, though!



Right?



Right?
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:30 PM on September 29, 2008

In addition to the cross-posting angle, the idea of a place that has more info about specific destinations seems like a cool idea. With maybe a way to perpetually update it. Users could toss all their [destination city] info into a specific [destination city] thread, and new questions about [destination city] can still be answered, but linked to the [destination city] thread as well. Yes, people can Google for info, but many MeFites trust the opinions and input of their fellow-MeFites over random search results.

fwiw
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 8:22 PM on September 29, 2008

In addition to the cross-posting angle, the idea of a place that has more info about specific destinations seems like a cool idea. With maybe a way to perpetually update it. Users could toss all their [destination city] info into a specific [destination city] thread, and new questions about [destination city] can still be answered, but linked to the [destination city] thread as well. Yes, people can Google for info, but many MeFites trust the opinions and input of their fellow-MeFites over random search results.

The MetaFilter Travel Wiki.
posted by JDHarper at 8:33 PM on September 29, 2008

MetaWiki TravelFilter.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 8:51 PM on September 29, 2008

Trip reports with cross posted askme travel questions sounds good. I can understand not wanting to cannibalize askme, that doesn't make sense.
posted by madamjujujive at 8:54 PM on September 29, 2008

I really liked the fledgling version of the site, too, and agree that trip reports + crossposted questions leading to a single thread is a good compromise.

Trip reports were great because they sparked the generation of content that wouldn't exist otherwise. Like, I might know a lot of great stuff to do and see from my travels in, um, the Florida Keys. But I'm not going to do anything about that knowledge until someone posts a question to AskMe and, if I happen to see it, and happen to have time to deal with it, I write something up as a response. So the AskMe travel content becomes entirely dependent on a confluence between a questioner's interest during the window in which they're making travel plans, and the Ask readers' experiences from past travel that may be dimming in memory.

Trip reports, on the other hand, are fun to write about soon after you get back, when you still have plenty of clear detail. You aren't limited by the "usefulness" concern of AskMe, so you're free to list sights to see, make recommendations, pan stuff, praise stuff, and be personally quirky. You most likely wouldn't sit down to write them if you didn't have time to flesh them out with links and specifics, so they contain more detail than some of those slapdash or dimly remembered AskMe travel responses ("I don't have time to look it up now but I think if you walk down the main drag and look for like a fountain and blue building on your left, I can't remember what the street is called, but there's a bar there in a gazebo type thing with awesome margaritas. Jack's or Jeff's or Andy's or something").

So I think, of all the envisioned extra features beyond Q&A, trip reports are the most valuable. Flickr's nice, but it's easy enough to do your own search there - and, hey, if you allow trip reports people can link to their own Flickrs of their trips within the reports. They create a new pile of content you wouldn't otherwise get, and might even pique the interest of people who are just randomly shopping for their next destinations. I'd be more inclined to go somewhere oddball if I saw a MeFite I thought well of posting an interesting and intriguing travel report. I agree that recommendations here are far better, far more tightly 'filtered,' than those at most travel sites with user-created content and much better than the confusion that is commercial sites. The trip report service alone is a big value to the community.

So I hope it can live as its own entity, simplified to its best essence and not interfering with or taking from AskMe.
posted by Miko at 9:36 PM on September 29, 2008 [2 favorites]

What if you just allow, optionally, for AskMe questions to be geo-coded? There are plenty of non-travel questions that are location specific: "Where can I buy a pound of halal Salami in Idaho?" etc. that don't belong in Travel but would totally benefit from showing up on a map.

Then, allow people to click on a tab that says something like "AskMes by Location" and only geo-coded questions show up. People are allowed to enter a Country, a City location (identifiable by Google maps or something), or a latitude/longitude.

This way you get the best part of Travel -- the geocoding -- without having to freak about separating all the questions away, etc.

Best of all, for questions where the place matters but isn't mentioned in the question ("I just got kicked out of my apt. What are my legal options?") this could give a nudge to both asker and answering to get specific to the locale.

As far as a MetaFilter travel wiki. I really think there is a bit of a trend here for people to want to stay "In" MeFi, but I think we should be good internet citizens and share our knowledge more broadly. If you have travel knowledge about an area, please go to WikTravel to share it. Similarly, you can mark out locations of interest on WikiMapia. The travel pages for a given location could link to these resources in addition to any relevant AskMes.
posted by Deathalicious at 10:06 PM on September 29, 2008 [3 favorites]

How about no sub-site at all, but on ask.mefi, when "travel" is chosen as a category, it triggers the extra features for that page like pulling from flickr, linking to other nearby travel questions, weather, etc. It'll get indexed appropriately on Google and the right people will find it without it needing to be over-emphasized.

i considered moving the location-aware features of our travelfilter mockups over to ask mefi proper, but I felt that it would be weird for a few reasons. First, it'd be a little weird that one category had a ton more information than the others -- it'd likely encourage more use, since it would appear more developed and I didn't want to see an imbalance where people are like "omg, please no more damn 50 travel questions a day in ask mefi!"

Also, the location stuff could be generic and apply to questions in other categories, so why limit to travel? Then, if you are asking a question about renting a party clown in NYC, why not throw it on the NYC pile? That would carry over more of the travelfilter features to the other categories, but it would lead to a pretty confusing Post a Question page interface. It'd be a pretty complicated form to ask for a city/state/country if it is pertinent to the question, and we would have to require in some instances (travel category) but not others, though I tend to think more people would use it when they probably shouldn't because it's another field to be filled out.

Then there's a problem with "trip reports" since those don't fit anywhere into ask mefi.

crossposted questions leading to a single thread is a good compromise

I'm not a fan of that idea for the reasons in my first paragraph here. I think it'd give travel questions more weight and they'd start dominating the front page of ask mefi.

We actually looked at statistics, and travel was somewhere in the middle in terms of popularity and numbers of questions. By far the most popular category is computer tech "why doesn't my wifi connect" filter, and I'm not really keen on creating a subsite for that. We picked travel because it seemed like we could do interesting stuff like have city pages and one place to see every hotel recommendation in NYC ever, so we hopefully wouldn't see more of those questions.

We used travelfilter to test out a lot of ideas like a new URL scheme, some flickr integration, some Yahoo local services, related questions, and geocoding stuff. A lot of it trickled into other parts of the sites and on our profile pages which took a lot of the innovation thunder out of it.

At this point, I'm thinking maybe just trip reports could live at travel.metafilter.com, and maybe some of the location stuff could go to the travel category in ask mefi, but I'd hate to see it tweak the front page of ask mefi too much. Maybe after the initial novelty wore off, travel questions would go back to normal, or maybe there could be less of them given the city pages are good at finding things to do in various places on earth.

Still room for GigFilter at MeFi Music, though!

Gigfilter is bigger than music (as actors, dancers, poets, and artists on mefi could attest) so we're still kicking around ways to make it work for all without replicating all of upcoming.org or having it be an annoying self-promotional thing that people spam to death.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:16 PM on September 29, 2008

Thanks, Matt. Hopefully it will incarnate in one form or another in the fullness of time.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:21 AM on September 30, 2008

Gigfilter is bigger than music (as actors, dancers, poets, and artists on mefi could attest) so we're still kicking around ways to make it work for all without replicating all of upcoming.org or having it be an annoying self-promotional thing that people spam to death.

Hey, Matt, that's great. Here's hoping it'll come to fruition!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 12:28 AM on September 30, 2008

jessamyn: "Cross-post questions with the "travel" tag and have a single thread updated jointly from both sub-sites?
That was my idea originally!"

Can we get a rolling vote going for this? Is it too late to turn the tide?

Mine makes three, so only about 69,997 to go, right?
posted by dg at 12:56 AM on September 30, 2008

Mine makes three, so only about 69,997 to go, right?

69,996.5

I really like the idea because I love travel questions and could direct friends there who are seeking travel info, but wouldn't that basically duplicate the travel & transportation category?
posted by JaredSeth at 4:10 AM on September 30, 2008

Also, the location stuff could be generic and apply to questions in other categories, so why limit to travel? Then, if you are asking a question about renting a party clown in NYC, why not throw it on the NYC pile? That would carry over more of the travelfilter features to the other categories, but it would lead to a pretty confusing Post a Question page interface. It'd be a pretty complicated form to ask for a city/state/country if it is pertinent to the question, and we would have to require in some instances (travel category) but not others, though I tend to think more people would use it when they probably shouldn't because it's another field to be filled out.

How about just a check box that asks "Is this question location-dependent?" (or something) which, if checked, either makes the additional questions appear or takes the user to a second page with those questions on it before final posting. If the "travel" category is selected, the checkbox gets filled by default, and if the user wants to uncheck it ("What airline has the best peanuts?") they can.
posted by Rock Steady at 4:42 AM on September 30, 2008

Having an area for trip reports would be great, as a lot of the location-specific asks don't always receive post-trip feedback. Plus everyone trusts a Mefi member's opinion.
posted by graventy at 7:26 AM on September 30, 2008

Don't we already have location information in the form of tags? Why not make http://travel.metafilter.com/go/us/ma/boston bring up the same results as http://ask.metafilter.com/tags/boston but with the added extra location goodness?

Trip reports could be added to the travel.metafilter.com frontpage as posts and incorporated into the mix.

Also can I have a pony? Is it possible to support using the Geo microformat in answers? It could be used for all sorts of awesomeness at some point, like maps that link to answers, but even on its own it would be useful*, and it would be invisible to everyone who doesn't want to use it.

*e.g. If you have operator installed. It should also be possible to write a greasemonkey script that
converts them to Google Map links or similar .
posted by tallus at 1:21 PM on September 30, 2008

At this point, I'm thinking maybe just trip reports could live at travel.metafilter.com, and maybe some of the location stuff could go to the travel category in ask mefi, but I'd hate to see it tweak the front page of ask mefi too much.

I somehow missed this thread. I'm in favor of making travelfilter as trip-reports only with no changes to ask metafilter. Trip reports are a different beast altogether and not represented elsewhere on the site. It'd be great if folks could ask for pre-traveling tips on Ask Metafilter and then take the time to write up a Trip Report when they return.

The Trip Reports could also be a bit of Q&A, asking for more details on this or that. As Miko says they are best written soon after the trip itself. I had several I wanted to post recently - about a trip to the Loire Valley and a trip to Baden-Baden and Strasbourg and about a trip to Torino and the Langhe - that I think would have been useful for people contemplating trips to either of those areas. But my memory of the details is now fading.
posted by vacapinta at 5:31 AM on October 6, 2008