UrbanGems.org aims to use crowdsourcing to distil people's opinions of London neighbourhoods.
Launched yesterday, the site invites users to compare side-by-side photos of public space, and vote for the ones whose visual and physical aspects best represent the qualities of happiness, beauty, or quiet.
The site will then rank London's top five most beautiful, calm and happy spaces and provide street maps to help people find them.
The project is run by researchers from Cambridge University's Computing Laboratory, who designed the interactive digital survey to quantify the 'fuzzy' qualities of engaging with one's surroundings.
Oppprtunities for city tourism boards
The idea of having a hot-or not game for neighbourhoods may be ripe for adoption by tourism direct marketing organisations (DMOs) worldwide.
Cape Town Tourism, for instance, recently used crowd-sourcing for a marketing initiative by inviting locals were asked to provide city travel tips via the hashtag #LoveCapeTown. Though the iAmbassador campaign ended on 5 August, the hashtag took on a positive life of its own and continues to engage Twitter users.
Contest potential
Vanilla OTAs banking on scaled-up booking volume to beat thin margins for referral fees and commissions may also find crowd-sourcing opinions on destinations in a hot-or-not game to be a promising venture.
Unlike general call-outs via social media, such as an open-ended request for people's opinions on great destinations as a Facebook question, a focused contest in quiz-style format that consumers are already familiarised with thanks to the popularity of sites like Hot-or-Not could gain traction.
To illustrate the point, one site that might benefit from a contest like this would be India's MyGola, which crowd-sources travel tips from experts and acts as a middleman to give these recommendations authority and accessibility to consumers and which recently raised $1 million in funding. The contest could raise brand awareness while fitting in with the company's basic business model.
Plenty of other possible crowd-sourced contest ideas are possible for destination and travel site marketers.