I launched 06-10 and constantly feel helpless and lost. What advice do you have?

I view the problem of too much information as a detractor. Let's say you go to Netflix Instant View and want to watch a comedy. Most of those are 1 or 2 stars and you needlessly flip through then until you get to something with some valuable rating.

Google fixes this issue with their algorithm based on popularity. Trip Advisor, in my opinion, is a garbage site, very confusing and cluttered. There is a reason people still buy travel guides and now ebook travel guides, because of the unreliability of search results.

A lot of times, especially when traveling, search engines change to local results, which might not be in the language you are looking for. Then you click on the English version and get different results. This is an attempt to standardize recommendations. Hopefully it will be like a living, breathing Lonely Planet guide accessible free of charge on the internet all the time.

Eventually, once the site grows, I will give incentives to the owners of the "recommendation" area access to update the contact information, but not the criticism, which will hopefully allow for more accurate data.

But yes, that is a concern.

I fully understand your concerns and I have wrestled with them over the years too. Yes, there are a bunch of travel blog sites, yes there are a bunch of review sites, but it isn't about who did it first, but who does it better.

Will I? I won't know unless I try. Can I fail? Probably, but that shouldn't stop me from trying.

I know people who made very lucrative businesses emulating existing companies with free data from the US census. On paper it should have failed, but it worked.

I see those websites as portals to information, but not aggregates. Think about Digg. What did they do? Nothing special, just post stuff you read from around the internet from the websites we all frequent. Reddit replaced it as king because it did that better (much, much better actually).

The idea is to improve on an existing niche. Give the people something your competition doesn't give them. Although many travelers use google for research, there is a bunch of garbage that needs to be filtered out. They do a good job, but not a great one. Do I want every hotel or restaurant listed? No, I prefer just the really good ones and provide quality control to steer people towards the must-not-miss for quality, value, or whatever.

One more note. When I started this project, my expectations where for every 100 people, 10 create blogs and 90 come for the information. Out of the 10 blog users, if 2 were consistently active, I would view that as a success. So, the blog section needs 2% active use for it to be a success because my reality is that most people:

1) don't write or care to share 2) view it as a hassle

I am a story teller and want to give other story tellers the ability to do so.

Thank you for all the attention and fantastic suggestions. I have begun implementing most of the suggestions here and we are going on a revamp of the site based on these recommendations.

It is very easy to become disenfranchised with a project such as this, but it is good to know that there is support somewhere!

Will it work? Maybe. Will it fail? Possibly. But it is worth trying