We started this project with a really clear idea of the problem we were trying to solve for the end user: help them navigate the massive volume of online content created every day about what you should do in New York and London and find the best stuff as quickly and painlessly as possible. If you don’t know precisely what you’re searching for this can be surprisingly difficult.
Take the following scenario: you’re off to New York and you’d like to find somewhere special for that ultimate cocktail experience. You’re only there for three nights – so you can’t really afford to screw up. NYC is a big city and there are *a lot* of cocktail bars. Some are better than others, and new bars open as quickly as others close. On top of that, the cocktail bar scene is fickle – the cocktail bar ‘du jour’ changes on a… well, daily basis. Straightforward web searches are not great at dealing with all this – they tend to reward sites that have been around a while with higher rankings than those that have just launched, and of course it’s possible (apparently) to game search engines. Not only that, but mixologists working at the bleeding edge of cocktail creation may be simply too busy shaking their stuff to spend time optimising, updating or even creating websites.
Try the search term “New York cocktails”. You’ll get at least 20 million results. The very top of the first page is useful, although you’ll find ‘the usual suspects’ rather than discovering hidden treasures. But even on the front page there are results that will seem frustratingly irrelevant to your search: articles from 2006, book reviews, cocktail recipes. There’s massive search clutter precisely because New York is a global cocktail pilgrimage shrine. They invent cocktails. And they give them cocktail-defining names like Manhattan Iced Tea and Metropolitan.
Search engines are extremely useful when you know kind of what you’re looking for or have lots of time to sift and refine your search terms, but they don’t know as much about cocktails right this second as – for example – NY Barfly, who is one of the bloggers contributing content to Metrotwin (see his profile here). NY Barfly is a domain expert in cocktails. He’s the kind of guy you’d ask if you knew him. He’s ‘the man’. He’s out every night testing drinks and bars so you don’t have to take chances, and he does it because he loves it – it’s not even his main job. It’s his life. When you’re reading NY Barfly you’re tapping a depth of knowledge and a category focus you’re not going to get anywhere else.
Thing is, there are people New York and London blogging like this about burgers, pizza, doughnuts, restaurants, free stuff, city walks, being a mum in the city, painting, geek stuff and just about every other highly specialised micro-vertical niche you’d care to experience while you’re there. They’re updating their sites every day – sometimes many times a day. When you consider how much most peoples’ trips to either city now use the Web – for booking, planning and organising the social side of things – it seems to make perfect sense to connect visitors with local, expert bloggers and niche online communities. We’re trying to help people find the best blogs and sites to support their trips as well as provide recommendations.
We’ve met all of the bloggers and site owners contributing content to Metrotwin in the flesh. Nearly everyone we’ve approached has been excited by the idea – after all, they face a similar challenge trying to reach new readers through the wall of noise, and British Airways carries a vast number of people looking specifically for authentic, qualified recommendations between both cities every year. At BA.com they’ve recently created an index page for all the Metrotwin partners in one place – you’ll find it here, and there’s a screenshot below.
The Metrotwin Partners page on BA.com
We’ve also set up a page on Netvibes (screenshot below) where we’re aggregating feeds from as many partners as we can into a single page, as well as providing feeds from other useful online resources, all in one place. Hopefully, it will save you time if you’re using the blogosphere to piece together the perfect itinerary from the collective wisdom of a small crowd of experts in both cities. Use the Lists page on Metrotwin as a taster.
Image of the Metrotwin Netvibes page
