WalesCymru.com

This is a call to action to every Welsh business owner. We want WalesCymru.com to be the best online directory for Wales, and we want to achieve this by 31st March 2008!

That means not only do we have to be the most comprehensive directory, we also have to provide the best quality content and best directory service of any of our competitors.

This is achievable!

By basing WalesCymru.com on Web2.0 principles, or Directory2.0 - as some commentators may call it, everyone in Wales can contribute towards this goal. You don’t even need to be the business owner.

What should I do now?

If you’re a business owner, sign up today and add your listing, it’s free and should take less than 5 minutes to do.

If your favourite pub, restaurant, shop, or place is not already listed, we can’t have that! Please encourage the owner to create their free WalesCymru.com listing. Or, if you’re feeling really generous, why not do it for them - just don’t claim to be the owner if this is not actually the case.

My business is already listed. OK, we or someone else have already added you, that’s great as it will save you time. Simply sign up and ‘claim it’. We check your claim to make sure you’re the genuine owner, but once approved you have full control of this listing. You’ll then be able to edit the description, add indexing ‘tags’, upload photos, include a link to your own website and move the map pin, if this is not correctly positioned.

Please help us achieve our goal to be the best online Directory for Wales.

Following complaints that public money has been used to unfairly compete with operators of commercial booking services VisitWales have announced today that they will no longer supply an online booking service from January 2008.

The VisitWales communication states:

“Over the past year, the EC has been investigating VisitBritain, VisitScotland and Visit Wales following a complaint that these bodies used public money to offer an online booking service that competed unfairly with commercial operators. Each organisation has had to justify to the EC its operation of online booking, and as a result, all have had to make changes to remain compliant with EC competition law. Having taken the advice of the Welsh Assembly Government Legal and State Aid teams, Visit Wales will withdraw its online booking facility from its websites by the 1st of January 2008. We continue to work in partnership with the Wales Tourism Alliance to maximise online opportunities for the future.”

This decision brings into question the future role of any Public financed Destination Management or centralised Booking System. Given that at least two such projects are being advanced in Wales that will seek Public money to build such systems (one to develop a pan Wales ticketing system for Welsh events and the other to provide Cardiff with a ‘one stop shop’ for hotel and event bookings), the organisations backing these initiatives should take note.

If there is a way forward, Public Private Partnerships, using Web2.0 principles combined with XML, mash-ups and the latest advances in social networking system may provide the answer. Watch this ‘box’ for further updates on this topic.

I realise this is not very new or perhaps that exciting; but I think it’s important. Most publishing businesses believe you have to provide great content that is relevant to the reader to be successful. Don’t get me wrong, this is important, BUT it is not why these companies exist and it is not the key to their long term success.

Publishers, and here I’m talking mainly about news and magazine publishers, are like every business. They exist for one reason and that is to make money. The way publishers do this is by ’selling access’ to their readers - that’s YOU.

OK, some publishers are good enough to provide ’subscription only’ journals, but the majority rely on advertising to survive. This is equally true for local newspapers, glossy magazines, and trade journals as it is for commercial websites. If the publisher cannot convince advertisers that they can deliver the audience the advertisers want to reach, their publication will not survive, regardless of how good its content.

Which comes to my point. YOU are what’s really important, and not the content.

Most publishing houses, however, have very little idea of WHO YOU ARE and know very little about you. This will change!

The question you will be soon asked is which publishers do you have a close enough relationship with to share those important personal details, such as your name, income, place of work, home address, email, buying preferences and your personal, career and social aspirations.

If you want to see the future, take a good look at your Facebook profile and compare the amount of information known about you here to that held by your local newspaper or broadcasters.

Who really knows ‘you’ best and is able to deliver the content that you want to see?

From today users can post comments to our blog (you need to register to use this blog).

Please use this topic to report any bugs you find.

Thanks

Several users have asked if they can post items to our blog. Currently the answer is no, although we may change this at some later date.

In the meantime you’re welcome to register and post “comments” to any existing items. You can use this topic to post any comments, suggestions, criticism, etc. that relate to improving the site, enhancing community features, or simply to provide a more rewarding experience.

Yes, we know, the search is still not working as we’d like - sorry.

The reason is we’ve tried to be ‘too smart’ for our own good.

The location search we using employs a ‘map based’ approach, where the location tag is centred around all listings that identify themselves as being ‘in or near’ this location.

At this stage, with only 6500 listings some locations are not correctly centred, with the result some location searches are producing strange results.

As we add more listings, with correct lat and long references, the search will get better.

We are also changing the search weightings, so ‘Name’ will have a much higher weight than it does now; i.e. it should appear above other listings that have the same matching terms; but only in the ‘tags’ or indexed keywords.

We are introducing a fuzzy logic, so you can add or leave our spaces, hypens, etc. and still get the right results.

These updates should go live later this week (by Friday, 9 Nov 2007 Wednesday, 14 Nov 2007)

I hope this answers your search questions at this time.

Greg

We’re all aware social networking sites are growing both in numbers and value, despite lacking a sound commercial basis - but that’s the subject of another post.

What I’m interested to explore here is the numbers game. So I thought why not simply note down the number of people who have signed up to Facebook’s Wales network over a week or so and see how this changes. OK, it’s not that scientific and as the time I noted the numbers varies, an hour or so each way would have produced different results; but it’s the trend I’m really intereted in. Anyway, here are the results thus far:

Date Members

04/11/2007 187,263
03/11/2007 186,188
02/11/2007 184,972
01/11/2007 183,591
31/10/2007 182,127
30/10/2007 180,739
29/10/2007 180,285
28/10/2007 177,695
27/10/2007 176,715

Not bad, 10,548 new users added in just 8 days, and for a company that has done NO ADVERTISING in Wales, or the UK for that matter.

UPDATE: 5 December 2007, 215,805 people have now joined the Wales network on Facebook; that’s 40,000 new users in 40 days.