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(c) Elliott Publishing.

City Guides
Kirby's Korner · September 24, 1999

Microsoft's Slate magazine had a three-day exchange of articles in its Book Club section this week on printed travel guides, conducted by a freelance writer who has contributed to them and an editorial assistant for the Web-based publication.

The writers weren't crazy about any of the guides and, to some extent, wondered whether the Web will drive the printed versions to extinction.

Guide publishers have wondered the same thing. Each has taken a different approach in handling the Web and America Online's proprietary service, sometimes embracing them and sometimes using them as little more than a vehicle for advertising. I'll take a look at the guides' approaches next column.

This time, I want to point out an example of a related online publishing effort, city guides.

I like city guides. When I visit a new destination, at least in the United States, I look for information in them rather than in typical travel guides. They offer a resident's view of the city along with tourist information, not just the "hot things to do" approach of travel guides.

The two styles remind me of the difference between a guided tour and exploring on your own. A group tour in an air-conditioned bus can be fun, but if you want to learn the city you have to get out and walk.

City guides have been around since before the Web went commercial -- what is now the Excite search engine grew out of a group of locality-based pages of links. Small companies have flourished producing city guides -- witness CitySearch -- and large companies have failed, as Microsoft acknowledged when it recently announced plans to get rid of Sidewalk. (Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch, Inc. -- and you can guess which two companies merged to form that one -- is taking over the editorial aspects of Sidewalk and may or may not continue the name.)

Local newspaper Web sites serve some of the same purposes as city guides, and America Online's Digital City effort has done a good job of competing with the local papers, at least the feature-driven weeklies in major cities.

It's not surprising that new companies pop up constantly attempting to compete. This week, CitiQuest.com launched, with an ambitious Web site covering 850 locations.

Let's not mince words. This has to be one of the most poorly conceived ideas for a Web site I have ever had the misfortune to come across. It takes the worst part of the last iteration of Sidewalk -- throwing together what are essentially online classified ads -- and then eliminates even the pretense of local content related to the ads that Microsoft has held on to.

To make matters worse, a visitor must register at the site to do nearly anything useful. And, of course, the visitor can't decide whether the site is useful before first registering. I'm not sure why anyone would come back a second time.

Within individual city areas, visitors can get lists of, say, restaurants. But the listing consists of nothing more than name, address, and telephone number, as well as a link to a map. No information is provided on how good the restaurant is.

The listings for movie theaters are worse. Yes, visitors can find where the theaters are. Can they find what's playing at them, let alone what the showtimes are or how the films rate? Duh, we forgot!

Travel can be booked through Travelocity.com, a good online agency but available through dozens of other sites. Maps come from MapQuest.com, a service also available through numerous sites throughout the Web.

CitiQuest's primary problem is that it doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up. It promotes itself as a city guide, but it already offers free e-mail accounts, calendars, address books, and similar options designed to keep visitors at a site for advertising purposes -- something all portals are attempting to do. Unfortunately, CitiQuest doesn't have the editorial backing it needs to cause people to stay around.

This quest will have to move forward to succeed.

David Kirby is the editor of the Interactive Travel Report. His column appears on Friday. You can reach him at dbkirby@pressroom.com.