I'm about to leave for a week of vacation in Croatia's golden port city, Dubrovnik. Aside from admiring the beauty of the ancient walls and the blue, blue Adriatic, I also want to eat well -- squid ink risotto, fried calamari, clams in white wine and garlic...all of these top of the list of reasons to head down to seaside Croatia from landlocked Hungary. I've spent this morning scanning the web for restaurant recommendations in Dubrovnik, and I find myself stymied once again by the complications of sifting through online information.
Conventional wisdom tells me that I should be using my trusted online networks to find this information, and indeed, I have turned to the places I normally would for restaurant recommendations, that is, sites that I trust to give me some good reviews. I started with Saveur magazine's online archive, moved on to Chowhound, Gridskipper, and TimeOut. I checked Dubrovnik on Technorati to see if anyone had blogged about restaurants recently, and Dubrovnik/food/restaurants on Flickr to see if anyone had usefully tagged photos.
The result is not that great, an hour later, and has led me to consider (as I often do when I'm looking for travel information) what a hit or miss operation information searches and relying on trusted networks are when, in reality, you don't have a trusted network in place. Here's a quick run-down of what I found:
Saveur, my most exalted, trusted source, is not in any way a member of the read/write web. They publish a dead-tree magazine, and they put those articles online. That said, they are absolutely the best, and have never, every failed me in any of my travels from lobster pasta in Venice to mind-bendingly good tapas in Xerez, Andalusia. Unfortunately, they've never written on Dubrovnik. So cross that one off for this trip.
Chowhound, my next best source for recommendations, troubled me this time around. Chowhound is a site for people who consider themselves "foodies", and the "chowhounders" do their good work by sniffing out small, unknown restaurants. Their very useful discussion forum can sometimes yield epicurean gems. The problem with Chowhound is that it's largely a US-based site; their international discussions are not, in fact, very trustworthy. In a search for Dubrovnik, I found lots of discussion threads, but when I cross-referenced the recommendations on the discussion threads with a guidebook I have (the always-useful but not culinarily-minded Lonely Planet), I found almost 100 percent overlap. That is, the so-called chowhounds who were writing about Dubrovnik were not sniffing out new, unknown local joints, but were in fact commenting on the restaurants already in the guidebook that just about everyone who visits Crotia has in their backpack. There's certainly utility in that, but ... if the users on Chowhound are simply discussing what Lonely Planet has already recommended, I wouldn't rely on them as experts; it's not a trusted network after all. And indeed, there are no Croatians posting on Chowhound that I saw, which is really unfortunate. (The other kind of recommendation on Chowhound for Dubrovnik are the "I went to a great little restaurant down a back street near the port, but I can't remember the name" variety, which are just kind of irritating. Please, don't bother.)
On to Gridskipper, which does list Dubrovnik as one of its cities "on the grid"; however, the only restaurant recommended there is not qualified in any way -- the writer just says it's "one of the city's best". Well, maybe, but when I search online I don't find other information on it or recommendations for it. So that really wasn't so helpful, and I realize that when push comes to shove (am I going to get into a cab and cross the city to go to a specific restaurant) I don't really trust Gridskipper on restaurant issues -- or at least not on this one. Since there's no context for the recommendation, and I don't know who the writer is, I'm skeptical.
TimeOut is semi-useful, but they want us to buy the dead-tree copy so the information is light. I do trust TimeOut, but again -- not really the read/write web. I'm just going by their single writer's recommendations.
The noise on Technorati around Dubrovnik is too difficult to sift through -- lots of link factories or advertising come back, so I give up. Flickr yields, as usual, a wonderland of beautiful pictures of Croatian seafood when I do my search, but there's no associated information with any of the pictures (i.e., where did you eat that gorgeous shrimp?)
The moral of this story is that I've ended up a bit stymied. No online source that I really trust has led me to good restaurant options in Dubrovnik. I'm now planning to call up a friend who's a tour guide and was in Croatia with a group a few weeks back for her insights, and then go out and buy a copy of another friend's book on Croatia, Annabel Barber's Visible Cities Dubrovnik.
I think the reason I find this long tale interesting is because of, well, the theory of the internet's long tail that Wired's Chris Anderson and others have written extensively about over the past two years. The theory, which I largely agree with, is that web 2.0 allows for incredibly rich information geared to very niche markets or demographics (foodies traveling to Dubrovnik, i.e.); related thinking revolves around the idea that trusted communities will form around these niches, and that the read/write web allows everyone to join those communities as both a consumer and producer of information. That's great, again, I largely agree with that.
The problem I see is that some niches which are transitory, and some niches aren't. I am going to care for a long time about data security and human rights organizations, and it's worth it for me to build a community of trust around that issue. I only care this week about good restaurants in Dubrovnik, and it really not worth it for me to build or join a community of trust around that. Nevertheless, I want to be able to dip into online communities who do care about that issue when I need to know more about it -- and yet, I'm not really in a position to evaluate who is a trusted source in a specific network. How do I know that so-and-so poster on Chowhound is reliable? Why should I trust the person who recommended to Gridskipper that X restaurant in Dubrovnik is excellent? So, one of the downsides I see with the beauty of niche information is the inability of an individual to be involved in as many as they want to, or need to, be. I think that what comes out of this is more and more recommendation systems a la Slashdot or Digg that are geared in a very niche way. However, a lot of sites will need to be rebuilt to put those kinds of tools in place....so I still see a long haul ahead of us for making the read/write web truly useful. These kinds of experiences are a good reminder to me that, no matter how fast it seems like we're moving on communications technologies, we're still taking baby steps. And that's why I'm heading out now to buy Annabel's book to take with me this afternoon to Dubrovnik.
PS: If any of my five readers have a suggestion for where to eat in Dubrovnik, leave a comment!