Social networking and blogs for travel companies

Alex Bainbridge, on the TravelUCD forum, points us to a rather curious site, created for businesses by the UK's leadng telecomms provider BT.

BT Tradespace is an area for (predominantly) small and medium-sized businesses to produce blogs, create videos and podcasts, and publish deals.

The site is divided into sectors, including weddings, software and, of course, "Holidays and Leisure".

It is free to sign up and create a "space" - and many travel companies have.

The blog area for each business, for example, allows readers to rate each inidividual post, similar to the Digg model.

This is where the curious nature of the project appears to end and the reality of what is actually going on kicks in.

Most of the posts are little more than ad bulletin boards and are not really blogs at all. A case of using a trendy web model because it sounds like something that should be done. The voting element is a nice touch, but who is going to take the time to vote on a sales pitch.

As Bainbridge points out, the structure of the site - very keyword heavy - suggests it has been built with SEO in mind.

A good initiative but not executed particularly well.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution