world66 blog

Internet Brands

2006-04-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

Today we make the big announcement: World66 and Wikitravel are becoming part of the Internet Brands family.

We are very excited! With Internet Brands we will be able to grow World66 faster, we will be able to implement new features better and with Wikitravel also on board we will get a much better shot at realizing the big dream: making an open travel guide that beats any other travel guide you can find, both online and printed. I believe that by teaming up this goal is within reach.

Stay tuned for new features & new developments!

Winners travel grants

2006-03-05T23:51:00.000-08:00

We've kept you waiting a bit and we're really sorry about that, but the good news is that today we announce the first winner of a travel grant.

The first travel grant goes to Andrea Jehn & Craig Kennedy from Access Anything. They have written a guide to Colorade for people living with disabilities and they plan to write a lot more. "Go anywhere, do anything!" they say, and we couldn't agree more. Congratulations guys!

Globetrotter Index

2006-02-24T01:12:00.000-08:00

Based on an idea of one of our users (kesselborn) we have computed the World66 globetrotter index. We have compared the home country of our users with the number of countries they have visited. We compared countries from where we had more than 100 users and it appears that the Swiss have visited an average of 23 different countries followed by the Greeks and the Belgians with 22.

The least traveled people? The Americans. The average US World66 user visited just 11 different countries. But of course, the US is big.

To see the full results, visit our globetrotter index

We got stuff to do

2006-01-06T02:34:00.000-08:00

Happy new year to all!

The year has started and boy have we got stuff to do! I guess we should have known when we started the Travel Grants programme that we would receive more than just a few submissions. And now it is upt to us to decide... Boy, have we got stuff to do.

Introducing: travel grants

2005-08-05T01:40:00.000-07:00

Our talk on Wikimania will be on the subject of paying people to write open content. And that is exactly what we will be doing.

We have just published a new programme called Travel Grants. The idea is that if you are planning this cool trip and you think it would be interesting to write about the places you go to on World66.com, you can receive a travel grant. We will be giving away 10,000 dollars to the people with the best plans, best writings kills or most enthusiasm.

Sign up now!

We're off to Wikimania

2005-08-04T01:33:00.000-07:00

We will be attending the Wikimania Conference in Frankfurt today. We will be presenting a new project, so stay tuned for updates...

City maps on world66

2005-07-11T03:02:00.000-07:00

We have Google Maps in world66. In the US, Canada and the UK you will find city maps in our guides that are made using the Google Maps API.

For some of the Points of Interest we have we know the coordinates, but for most we don't. But you can help - you can pinpoint the sights, restaurants and hotels you know on the maps. And if you find a location that is incorrect, just send us a mail!

World66 in the press

2005-06-15T02:11:00.000-07:00

Last week we were cited in Wired, this week K5 mentions W66 in a list of companies that Google may be interested in to acquire. "We can't comment in this stage," would be a good official reaction, but "this is our phone number" is equally good. It's +31-20-3449480.

New photo gallery

2005-06-03T06:15:00.000-07:00

We have said before that we have tons of great travel pictures on world66 - so it was time to make a new image gallery. The new one loads faster and gives you a great overview of all pictures in a specific destination. Check out the Amsterdam photo gallery

Webcams: new feature

2005-05-24T12:02:00.000-07:00

Originally published: 24 May 2005
World66, the travel guide you write, continues improving! We've recently added a nice and helpful Webcam feature, which means that you can now log on to interesting local scenery displays, broadcasted by selected quality webcams in a growing number of travellers locations.
Webcams may also supply precious information on actual weather conditions.
And as usual, if you know of relevant cams for travellers, anywhere in the world, you can of course add them to World66, using the new [Add Section > Webcams] input screen.
Curious? Hurry to the cams below to get the picture of this new feature. Enjoy!
Montreal in Canada (7 cams, Old Montreal recommended)
Hurtigruten coastal liner in Norway (cams on board of 2 ships)
Galicia region in Spain (14 cams)
Wadden island beach in The Netherlands.

Export mapsonomy maps

2005-05-11T08:33:00.000-07:00

It's a small link, but with big consequences. On every page of mapsonomy you can find a link saying "this map on your site". This also works for maps that are updated using rss, like the BBC news world map. I copy pasted that one to my personal blog and I quite like it.

Rss feeds in Mapsonomy

2005-04-29T06:32:00.000-07:00

In Mapsonomy you now can show rss-feeds on the maps too. If rss feeds contain geographical metadata it works like a dream, if they don't we try to find out what location the info in the feed is about and that works quite well too.

Check out:
BBC News map
Earthquakes world map
The photos uploaded by world66 member HPHarmsen

Yes, from the last URL you can conclude that every world66 member has a rss-feed that is geocoded of the photos he has uploaded, but that feature is still somewhat hidden.

Mapsonomy: new layout

2005-04-22T08:02:00.000-07:00

We have a new layout for mapsonomy - the new layout allows us to put more photos on the map and with a smart mouse over you still get all the info. We really love it - so check it out on www.world66.com/mapsonomy

Happy clicking!

Mapsonomy

2005-04-14T03:20:00.000-07:00

A cool new feature on our site: Mapsonomy you can access it form anywhere in world66 just by clicking on the mapsonomy tab - it then gives you a complete overview of the destinations around the city you were looking at.

I think it's pretty neat. The maps are really great, based on satellite photos and we try to cram as much useful info as possible.

There is more stuff to come - most notably the possibility to creat your own maps, with your own photo's and links and other stuff on them.

Go Where

2005-04-06T03:16:00.000-07:00

In the last days we've come up with a cute quiz that lets you discover what kind of traveller you are. Party Animal? Culture Buff? Rough Guy? Well, I've just tried out the quiz and here is the response:


	Your travel type: Culture Buff The culture buff needs to see a museum, an art gallery, a 16-th century church every day during his holiday. When he travels he is always well prepared. He has read history books, speaks a few words of the lingo, knows about the strange habits the locals have.
	top destinations: Venice New York Beirut	stay away from: Ciudad Perdida North Korea Darien Gap

We hope you'll like it as well.

Destination of the month becomes photo of the .. er .. day

2005-03-29T02:08:00.000-08:00

We used to have a destination of the month on the frontpage. It didn't change every month, though. I think Tallinn won the cherished trophy three months running. Congrats to our friends in the Baltics. There wasn't anything that special about the destination of the month, either. It was just a place we had covered quite well and that had a nice picture.

So we decided to use that space differently. Using flickrs tagging service we handpick nice photos that are uploaded on a daily basis and we publish a feed of it that is spliced with the feed of this blog. Now we decided to use that feed to change the destination of the month into a photo of the day. We don't promise it changes every day, but you will see very regular updates.

You may notice that the caption still reads 'featured destination,' so we've added some additional info on the destination the photo depicts and a link.

New Contribution Guidelines

2005-03-24T08:36:00.000-08:00

As many of you might know I've been World66 chief moderator for a couple of months now. In this period I realized that World66 needed a few, basic rules in order to give more consistency to our collection of travel guides. That's why I wrote the World66 "Manual of Style", a brief list of simple "dos & donts" which should make life easier for everybody :-)

Another big problem we are dealing with is spam. Uh, spam in a wiki? Sound strange, but it often happens that people who own a business (a hotel, a website, a restaurant etc..) write commercial-like articles with the only purpose of promoting their activity. In most of the cases they don't know they should't write promotional articles so I wanted to make it clear with this Business Owners Guidelines. If you run a business and want to write an article on World66 about it, please, please, please, read them before. Both you and World66 will save a lot of time and money.

Of course comments and suggestion are welcome.

New editing interface

2005-03-16T07:10:00.000-08:00

We have updated the editing interface and we hope it is easier to use. One of the new features is that it is easier to linke to other articles than before. It also works better with Firefox. Until now Firefox users had to know some basic HTML (which they mostly do) to edit on w66. Now they can use a WYSIWYG-interface.

In the new setup we also try to make it clearer that you shouldn't submit copyrighted materiel (which happens and for us it is hard to find out that it actually is) that you shouldn't just write a commercial write-up promoting your business, and that you should respect the work of other editors.

We hope you like it!

Faster than before

2005-03-03T02:21:00.000-08:00

Last night World66 moved to a new server, which means we are faster than before. See for yourself.

Over the last few months traffic to world66 has risen quite fast, which of course makes us happy, but it also meant that the old server was no longer quite up to the job. So we had to say goodbye. The old server is now serving websites that require less hard work than world66.

Better 404 (and 403)

2005-02-23T07:13:00.000-08:00

Okay, it's not a major improvement, but we still like to mention it: we have made new error pages. Try going to www.world66.com/abracadabra and you see what we mean (thanks Mark Karstad for letting us use the photo!)

For pages that are password protected we have a nice access denied (403) photograph.

Letters to World66.com

2005-02-18T03:15:00.000-08:00

I get a lot of letters, I mean snail-mail letters, from people who have stayed at Hotel Ajanta and want to tell me how great it was.

I have contacted Hotel Ajanta to tell them they can save on stampage - direct their guest directly to our online travel guide and do a write-up on the hotel. They have picked up the suggestion and added some stuff. Our editorial staff has removed some of the more outspoken commercial bladibla, and you can find the hotel in our database and their guest can use the rating system to rate it, or rewrite the texts so that it matches their experience.

Funny thing is: the letters keep coming. Got two by mail yesterday...

Ratings of Point of interests

2005-01-26T11:08:00.000-08:00

It all started when a hotel booking site approached us if we were interested in adding hotel content. A lot of sites try to add commercial content to world66 and our policy is that if the content adds value for travelers we can accept it. A hotel with a good description and a link to a page where you can book that hotel is good content, we think. The same goes for restaurants etc.

Through this hotel booking site we could add hotels with descriptions and we would get coordinates of the hotels so we could put them on our maps - a feature we are still working on. There would be links to the booking site and we could get a finders fee if someone used the links to book the rooms. We explained the idea of open content and said that their stuff would be publishes with a creative commons license. They said that that was okay.

There were some other issues we needed to address:

We explained we would never put their hotels in a better position than other hotels that were added by travelers
The descriptions would be editable; travelers would be able to write about bad experiences as well as good ones.
In some destinations we had so many hotels that we needed something else. A new mechanism to decide which hotels would be shown first.

To fix this last point we have added a rating mechanism. Every point of interest in the database can have between one (really bad) and five (top notch) stars. Travelers give these stars and we show an average, but you are only allowed to vote once for one item. Well, I guess you know the drill.

Well, the good thing is, it works. Check it out... Just go to any destination, look up a museum you know, or a bar, or a restaurant and give it a few stars.

And the maps? Well, we are still working on those. Will keep you posted.

Travel guides for the iPod

2005-01-11T02:04:00.000-08:00

Just read about Slice's Pizza guide for the iPod, the piPod. Great concept, funny name. Might be interesting option to look at for the world66 take away travel guides as well.

With the help of a PhP script provided by the people at Ambience, I have made a Amersfoort travel guide for the iPod. It's just a test to see if it works. Why Amersfoort you will ask- because I live there and it's a pretty nice town in the centre of the Netherlands. It's the only place I know where the traffic lights do not only show guys crossing the street but also proud women!

Download either the ZIP and UnZip it. Plug your iPod into your computer. When it shows up on screen, locate the "Notes" folder within it. Simply drag the piPod folder into the Notes folder. Easy as pie!.

Also free: RepliGo guides

2005-01-07T02:26:00.000-08:00

Our friend Antti Vilpponen has created RepliGo versions of our PDF guides. He writes:

However, I thought that since many smart phones (including mine) do not read PDFs as such - I converted the files to RepliGo -format, which is a very effective format for smart phones at least. (You can get your free reader from here)

We think this is excellent, so we have added his RepliGo guides to the Take Away section of World66. Have fun with them!

New: PDF travel guides for free

2004-12-21T07:50:00.000-08:00

We have just uploaded a new section to replace the old shop. We call it Take-away and you can use it to download complete guides in PDF format. Print them out and take them with you or put them in you PDA or phone - whatever you use to read PDFs.
The good news is: the PDF's are completely free and licensed under our CC-license. So go ahead: they are al yours.

The PDF's leave some space open for notes and we hope that you will use the space to jot down things you find wrong or missing and add those things as soon as you are back online.

The guides we offer now are:

Amsterdam	Pretty complete and up to date
Barcelona	Good, but needs some updating.
Berlin	Lots of info, some outdated.
Brussels	Good, but needs some updating.
Budapest	Good, but needs some updating.
Cairo	Good, but needs some updating.
Florence	Okay, but needs some updating.
Hong Kong	Okay, but needs some updating.
Lisbon	Okay, but needs some updating.
Los Angeles	Lots of info.
Madrid	Okay, but needs some updating.
New York	Not very good, needs complete overhaul.
Paris	Good, but needs some updating.
Prague	Good, but needs some updating.
Rio de Janiero	Okay, but needs some updating.
Rome	Good, but needs some updating.
Singapore	Good, but needs some updating.
Sydney	Not our best guide, so give us a hand!
Tokyo	Lots of info but may need update.
Venice	Pretty nice, we think.
Vienna	Okay, but needs some updating.

Belgium	Pretty good
Kazakhstan	Surprise destination!
Kenya	Rather complete, but some parts may need updating
Morocco	Quite complete, but help us make it better
Madagascar	Surprise destination!
Netherlands	A biggie, more than 1 MB of info on this small country.
Norway	Good but with some white spots
Russia	Russia is big - we try to keep up.
Switzerland	Good on the cities, weak on countryside
Thailand	Quite good, we think.

We know there are many more excellent guides on World66 and we will continue to add new guides to the list. Please let us know which new ones you would like us to add and we can start with those.

The Take-away page also contains a link to the XHTML guide, you can use to browse World66 on you phone. For most visitors of the site this mobile version of the World66 travel guide is new - but as a follower of our blog you already new this service.

About us

2004-12-09T07:18:00.000-08:00

We have updated some of the texts in the about section. We felt the old texts didn't make clear what we are about and why we run world66. It all sounded too much like we were just another business on the internet, while in fact we run an amazing open content project. Every time I go through the recent changes on world66 the whole thing amazes me: travelers on all continents are adding stuff about where they've been and what they've done and they are making world66 what it is: the most complete open content travel guide online.

At the same time we are making important changes to the site. You may have noticed that there is no longer a shop-tab on the site. You can still reach the old shop if you want, but that's also temporary. We are getting rid of it completely and will be replacing it by something better. A lot better because everything in it will be free.

So is this yet another "we're not evil company". I guess it is. But with a difference. We're no billionaires, either.

Why ads?

2004-11-24T01:41:00.000-08:00

World66 is an open content travel guide. It's free as in speech and free as in beer, so why are there ads on almost every page? It's a question we get every now and then and we think it deserves a response.

The obvious reason is: we get money when people click on them. And although World66 works only because thousands of travelers worldwide write about the place they visit, we have to spend an lot of time keeping the site in shape, we add features, we moderate. We're pretty busy doing that and we have costs. The ads are there to cover these costs.

There are of course other solutions to generate income. We could ask people to support the project and put a paypal button so that they can make donations. Wikipedia does that and for them it seems to work. But I don't see why that solution is better. They ask people who really like the project to pay for everybody else. We do not have to ask for money, but get some income because some of our visitors choose to click on ads.

In the end, we think ads work best. We believe there is a group of users for whom the ads actually add something. We use Adsense and Adsense does a great job putting quite relevant ads next to our travel content. You are likely to find ads from hotels in Stone Town on our Zanzibar pages and in some cases the information displayed in the ads may be just what that visitor is looking for.

Have smartphone, will travel

2004-11-19T01:52:00.000-08:00

Back in 1997 when we first started discussing about an open content travel guide, one thing was very clear to us: in the future travel guides would be used on digital devices. So, one of the first services we launched when we set up the site was a Avantgo channel to get travel info. It worked fine, but when Avantgo changed their business model (they wanted us to pay although the channel was for free) we stopped promoting it.

Later with the help of our friends at Plucker, we developed standalone Palm guides, which you could install on your Palm and use while you were away. We still have those, but they're not as fresh as we would like them to be.

Recently, we have been busy working on a version of World66 that can be browsed by phones as well as other devices. The news is: we have a beta version of World66 in XHTML

We would like to invite you to test drive it. You can find it at:

http://www.world66.com/alt/xhtml

Alternatively, you can use:

http://x.world66.com

Which doesn't contain images.

One of the cool features the XHTML guide has, is that when you start, it looks up your IP number and automatically brings you the travel guide of the country where you are. In most cases, that's what your will be looking for, isn't it?

Since this is in Beta, we would appreciate it very much if you could send us feedback on how you fared. Please include the country you were in when browsing, the phone you used and the browser you had on that phone.

Maybe there are also some people using Avantgo who want to test whether you can use the XHTML-guide as a custom channel. It should work, I think.

Photo feed of World66

2004-11-09T01:04:00.000-08:00

With the help of our friends at Flickr we have set up a photo feed that features the best photos uploaded to world66 every day.
It gives a quite good impression of the good quality of the photos our members take and also of the amazing array of places they visit: old towns in Germany, big cities in Asia, and small places somewhere in the jungle of Amazonia. You name it, they've been there, written about it and uploaded the best pics to the site.

To stay updated cope paste the ULR of the feed in your RSS-reader: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TravelPhotosOnWorld66comsPhotos

Otherwise, you can visit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/46642758@N00/

10,000 images on world66.com

2004-11-04T02:42:00.000-08:00

According to our latest count we now have more than 10,000 travel photos on world66.com. As they say images are worth more than a 1000 words, that would make over 10 million words. Phew!
When we first launched the possibility for people to upload their travel pics just one year ago we never imagined it would be this big a success. Another 10,000 for the next year?

City maps on world66

2004-10-19T02:27:00.000-07:00

Another new feauture: city maps on world66. Thanks to the University of Austin, Texas we have been able to upload about two hundred copyright free city maps.

To see how it works, check out our Riga travel guide
In the left menu, just below the Latvia map showing the location of Riga, you see a small preview of the city map, click the link and you see the full scale map. Quite neat, don't you think?

If you know of any collection of copyright free city maps we can use, drop us a note and we'll include them.

The next steps will be:

- Soon we will create the possibility for visitors and members to upload city-maps themselves. We will moderate the process to make sure that they are actual city maps and to see if they are not copyrighted.

- We are working a tool to show the location of restaurants, museums, hotels etc. on the maps. Be patient, this requires quite some work, also because this is one more process we need to moderate.

Maps showing location of cities

2004-10-14T06:46:00.000-07:00

We have introduced a new feature on the site. When we have the coordinates of a city, we show the location of the city on a small country map. It's pretty cool.

This is how it works. If you look up information on Medan but don't have a clue in which part of Indonesia it is, you can now see immediately where it is and whether you can fit it in your itinerary. Click on the small map and get a detailed map of Indonesia (and a really nice one, but we have to admit this is also due to the way Indonesia looks).

We will work on a way for people to place cities we don't have coordinates for on the maps, as well as on ways to tell us the location of a city is wrong. We'll keep you updated on that.

Clickable map on frontpage

2004-10-13T06:37:00.000-07:00

We have included a clickable map in Flash on the frontpage of world66. When you click on it, you go to the map of the continent. There is a mouse over that helps you select a country.

We hope it helps people find the info we have faster.

world66 blog

Internet Brands

Winners travel grants

Globetrotter Index

We got stuff to do

Introducing: travel grants

We're off to Wikimania

City maps on world66

World66 in the press

New photo gallery

Webcams: new feature

Export mapsonomy maps

Rss feeds in Mapsonomy

Mapsonomy: new layout

Mapsonomy

Go Where

Your travel type: Culture Buff

top destinations:

stay away from:

Destination of the month becomes photo of the .. er .. day

New Contribution Guidelines

New editing interface

Faster than before

Better 404 (and 403)

Letters to World66.com

Ratings of Point of interests

Travel guides for the iPod

Also free: RepliGo guides

New: PDF travel guides for free

About us

Why ads?

Have smartphone, will travel

Photo feed of World66

10,000 images on world66.com

City maps on world66

Maps showing location of cities

Clickable map on frontpage