A Classification Scheme for Analysing Web 2.0 Tourism Websites

This article proposes a Web 2.0 classification scheme developed from a study of tourism websites that have adopted Web 2.0 features. The article goes on to outline various website analysis techniques noted and reported in the literature. Moreover, the authors contend that these previously documented approaches are inadequate when used to analysis commonly encountered features associated with typical Web 2.0 website – many sites containing a combination of weblogs (blogs), videos, rating systems, images or other forms of user-generated content. The article continues with an example of how the authors developed their own approach to the analysis of Web 2.0 websites for a research study conducted on Web 2.0 tourism websites. A „snapshot‟ of comments from the blogs on each Web 2.0 website was classified according to a blog classification scheme proposed by Nardi, Sherman and Mansfield [2004]. The usefulness of the classification is highlighted as it provides a new perspective on the analysis of blog comments.