dreadedmonkeygod . net

I got a note yesterday morning from Trails.com:

Thank you for using Trails.com, the most complete outdoor and adventure travel planning resource. Below is a list of trail guides that you have viewed recently. Please take a moment to write a trail report based on your visit to share with other visitors. If you have not yet made it to these destinations, hang on to this email to review these trails once you have visited them.

My immediate reaction: Umm... why?

Why would I put work into improving Trails.com when I don't benefit from it? The whole site is behind a paywall, so only Trails.com subscribers will ever see my writeup. And if I stop subscribing, I lose access to my own writeup.

Contrast that with what I can do on Flickr or right here on my own blog: a complete write-up, including GPS data and photos from the trail, as well as links to more info elsewhere on the web. I can put everything I know about this trail in one place that's open to the whole net, including me, forever.

Trails.com is essentially a data warehouse, and it's tough to make money just being a gatekeeper. Their value add has to center on curation. There are only three properties that make information worth anything these days:

Discoverability: Can I find the information I need? Is it in a format I can view?

Completeness: It must include all relevant data. Driving directions, seasonal closures, rules for dogs and bikes, etc.

Freshness: The information must be up-to-date. Did the trail area burn in the recent fires? Is it closed for revegetation? Has the route changed?

Trails.com has a great deal of information under one roof, so they have completeness. But it's behind a paywall, and their internal searching is horrible, so it's not very discoverable. And it's all scanned from printed trail guides, so it's constantly getting leapfrogged by more current data available elsewhere.

User-created (and curated) data will help with all three. It'll be fresher than anything a print publisher can offer, and it'll accumulate to be extremely complete. And if they play their cards right, it'll do wonders for discoverability, too.

Now I should note that building an online community to help your site should come second to building great discoverability into the site itself. Trails.com has extremely weak searchability. They need strong, map-based searches, and full-text searching of all the trail guides they offer.

Once they have that, they can start thinking about community. They need to give users a reason to spend time enhancing Trails.com instead of just starting their own blogs.

They can build community by offering all user-created data for free to anyone, and can accelerate the growth of the community by offering premium features free to members who are either regular contributors, or who offer high-value write-ups (exotic locations, especially complete, etc.) And they can increase the value of user contributions (both for users and for themselves) by integrating with sites like Flickr, Blogger, FaceBook, MySpace, etc.

Right now, they're trying to build their site on the foundation of an enormous library of PDF trail guides. Good start. But that's just a completeness play. They need to make headway on discoverability and freshness. And if they really want to build community, they need to offer their users something in return.