January 10th, 2009, 3 Comments »
Back in October, 2007, I was messing around with Google’s then-new ‘My Maps’ feature. I made a map of all my favourite spots on Gozo (here’s the related blog post), the Maltese island where we lived for nine months. I added a bunch of Flickr photos and a couple of links to this site.
Today I was making a quick map using the same feature, and browsed through some of my older maps. I was surprised to discover that my Gozo memory map has received 13984 views. That seems like a lot. I just made it on a lark on a slow day in Malta.
I wasn’t sure where all those map views were coming from. I looked around, and wasn’t able to find a way to search all of Google’s publicly-accessible custom maps. Assuming they’re including them in Google Maps search results, I searched Google Maps for ‘Gozo’ (and variations), and noticed that my map is the only one listed under ‘User-Created Maps’.
I suppose, under certain circumstances, this would be a useful SEO strategy. You could embed links in placemark descriptions and, assuming they looked useful, Google Maps users might click them. I might add some relevant links to some more markers to test if it drives any traffic.
Browsing through my other custom maps, I see that our Sahara trip map has about 6000 views, and our zone-we-want-to-live-in map has about 4700 views. It’s not obvious what differentiates a popular map from an unpopular one. Any ideas?
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September 4th, 2007, 5 Comments »
The folks at Lonely Planet pitched me on this, and I actually thought it was pretty cool. They’ve launched a new service called Pick & Mix (currently only for Mexico, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean, so I guess it’s in beta) which enables you to buy individual chapters of their guidebooks. From the email I received:
To give people a chance to try Pick & Mix, the first chapter from each guide is free. Also, because we know how important it is to travel with current information, chapters are available prior to the release of the book. Right now, the new editions of the Guatemala and Baja guides are available via Pick & Mix in advance of the book release.
This is a pretty smart approach, because I often end up hauling around guidebooks and only using a small portion of them. For example, we bought a Hungary guidebook for our recent trip to Budapest (there were no Budapest-only books available on Malta). We barely left the capital on our trip, so eight-tenths of the book was just dead weight.
How Much Does It Cost?
I was checking out the Pick & Mix books, and noticed that there were some significant differences in price. Some chapters cost about four cents a page, while others cost as much as ten. I asked my Lonely Planet contact about it, and he said:
We considered different models, including iTunes-style flat pricing, but it just didn’t seem fair to charge the same for a 10-page chapter as for a 100-page chapter (our longest chapter, believe it or not, is a 244-page monster). So in the end we opted to base chapter prices on the price of the book, and the length of the chapter.
So, a long chapter with more information costs more than a short chapter. And a chapter from a $30 book costs more than one from a $15 book (assuming they’re a similar number of pages). About 80% of chapters ended up costing between US$2-4.
Is this a more environmentally-friendly option? I’m not sure. The printing industry no doubt has some efficiencies which means that the cost of printing one book is less impactful than printing out a hundred pages on your printer. But then you do avoid the resources expended on printing the cover and gluing the book together.
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