Travel Weekly Blog

The Telegraph travel site had a refit last week, gaining a snazzy map interface that lets you drill down to country-specific content. Also new is a series of downloadable destination guides.

While the map is a great feature, for me the guides are doomed to be neither fish nor fowl.

If they flag up the newest and trendiest attractions they have a short lifespan; if they do the opposite and highlight established hotspots then they have no real point of differentiation.

The problem, basically - and it is by no means unique to the Telegraph - is that they are generic and static, and web users can easily access something that is more niche and current.

So, money where mouth is: if I had unlimited resources, how would I use the web to deliver consumer destination guides?

It would be somewhere between content aggregator and desktop publishing software. Users would create their own guides by placing elements on a page using a simple interface - as per services such as MySpace, Ning or Netvibes.

They'd fill those elements with text, images, videos or feeds of their choice; alongside a New York feature from a newspaper might be a New York feed from Gridskipper, or a local weather feed from the BBC. Ideally much of this would come from an integrated content directory.

Finally they'd save the guide to a mobile device, or print a hard copy. Admittedly the latter renders the guide static, but if you're creating or updating it the day before you leave then that isn't a problem.

How does that sound? Or, if you're a Travolution reader, does it already exist?