Blogging in the Tourism Academy

I recently sent out a question to some 1000 or so tourism academics (professors, lecturers, graduate students, and other researchers) on email discussion lists, asking them "Do You Blog?" The purpose was to see how blogging is used by tourism academics. A summary of my findings can be found here:

http://tourismplace.blogspot.com/2007/05/why-dont-we-blog-university-faculty.html

The major categories or types of blogs that people told me about include:

• Blogging about Tourism
• Blogging for Classes and Students
• Research (and) Blogs
• Personal Travel Blogs
• Podcast Blogs
• Email Lists as Blogs

Click the link above for details. I have been updating these as new blogs are brought to my attention.

TalkShoe - Categories Listing - Travel

TalkShoe - Categories Listing - Travel

TalkShoe has become the destination for podcasters and podcast listeners who want to record live, synchronous, call-in episodes. I usually listen to these after they have been recorded, but if I were more on the ball, I could partcipate in them by either voice or text message. For both podcasters and podcast listeners this service is free, and although the content is entirely user generated, looking at their website they really do resemble a more formal podcast network.

The reason I bring it up TalkShoe here is because they have a Travel category that contains some interesting programs. You can listen to their most recent episodes and see when their next episodes are scheduled.

Not everyone is organized enough to schedule episodes in advance (I could never do that with my podcasts!), but some are. At the time of this mini-review, the following podcasts had scheduled programs:

• Florida Travel Deals -LorenGray 15 minutes (each week) of information regarding destinations in Florid... Next Episode Time: 06/07/07 02:30 PM EDT Talkcast ID: 27267
• PlanIt Podcast Live Call Ins - David Martin - Are you looking for the next great party or event location? Do you wa... Next Episode Time: 06/06/07 08:00 PM EDT Talkcast ID: 20394
• The TRAVELERS JOURNAL - David Bear - The TRAVELERS JOURNAL is a series of 2 minute audio postcards delivere... Next Episode Time: 06/04/07 09:00 AM EDT Talkcast ID: 14057

VeniVidiWiki -- Wiki Map Travel Guide

VeniVidiWiki: travel guide

VeniVidiWiki.eu is a Google map wiki mashup for attractions around the world. Anyone can add a POI (point of interest) to the map and provide as much as possible of the following information:

• Name of place/poi
• Category - those shown above are listed as POI with Video -- so they all have a video link; the full list of categories is listed on the left
  
• Description
• Website, and
• Photo and/or Video links

The wiki has a large number of sites, and crashed a few times when I was trying to view a lot of them. But in general it is quick and easy to navigate, and worth exploring to learn more about attractions in a place you may want to visit.

Virtual STA - Second Life Travel Agency

STA Travel in Second Life

STA Travel is among the largest travel agencies in the world with a focus on student, mostly university, travel. This week, STA became one of the first travel agencies to set up business, or sorts, in Second Life. STA's island in second life will offer:

1. Dedicated Portal and Orientation Island where students can join Second Life and easily and quickly learn how to navigate the virtual world.
2. Virtual Dorms that students can customize and use for private meetings and get-togethers.
3. Virtual Travel Destinations where students can experience Mayan Ruins, an Asian Temple and a French Cafe.
4. STA Travel Main Office where students can get travel and destination information.
5. Live Weekly Events and Tours produced by STA Travel as well as numerous travel partners.
6. Sandbox where students can practice building their own virtual environment.

Not all of these are ready now, but will be soon., and I would imagine that more will be developed in the future as STA, along with other travel providers, continue to experiment with virtual travel.

Google Goes Back to Pre-Katrina Maps

Google Goes Back to Pre-Katrina Maps - WashingtonPost.com

"NEW ORLEANS -- Google's popular map portal has replaced post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery with pictures taken before the storm, leaving locals feeling like they're in a time loop and even fueling suspicions of a conspiracy.

Scroll across the city and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and everything is back to normal: Marinas are filled with boats, bridges are intact and parks are filled with healthy, full-bodied trees."

"Web 2.0 - Over and Out" - or - Moves In Next Door

EarlyStageVC: Web 2.0 - Over and Out

Amid Peter Rip's (link above) dire predictions of the demise of Web 2.0, I think the emphasis should be on the mainstreaming of Web 2.0 (as evidenced by Time's Person of the Year award). And this should be good news for a travel industry that, to my mind, has a long ways to go to fully utilize the potential of the new social media.

See also the article on TechCrunch, where I first found the link above.

Rrove - Save, Share & Discover Places

Rrove "Share Your Special Spots"

Rove is a point or pin map creation tool that mashes up with Google or Yahoo Map. The example above is one person's list and map of the top attractions in Rome. Many of the maps are tourism and travel related (as maps tend to be, in general), including the Best of New York, and World's Best Beaches. Other maps show the location of members of a group (such as VlogInternacional ). Two nice features are (1) Detailed information that can be included on each item posted on the map, including descriptive tags, and (2) A short bit of HTML code that can be easily copied into any web page that you may have.

In fact, I created my own Rrove map for my Responsible Travel Network at Ning.com (see image below). It was easy to insert the code and tweak the width and height to fit the Ning.com size restrictions. Now members (and anyone else who visits ResponsibleTravel.ning.com) will be able to post their locations and their favorite responsible travel destinations. (You can also keep your map closed so that only you can post to it.)



Rove also promotes itself as a website for discovering places in the world, based on the maps that users have created. There is a search function, but I found it woefully lacking in its ability to find place that I searched for -- even though I had seen them on existing maps. In addition, there does not seem to be a way to search for a map (which they call "sets"). There were only 97 maps/sets on the day that I created my own map (above). But even then, it was a hassle trying to re-find the maps that I mentioned above.

In sum, Rrove.com is a great tool for creating and embedding user maps on your own web pages. I recommend it.

Ning - No More Excuses to Creating a Web 2.0 Travel Site

Ning.com is hottest new Web 2.0 tool to be announced this past week. Ning.com (now in version 2) allows anyone to easily create, through a drag and drop process, a Social Network on which members can post discussion items, blogs, photos and videos, and more. It is entirely free, with advertising, and $19/month without ads. Although it is in no way only for travel and tourism, there were close to 200 social networks that are tagged "travel" on the day that I wrote this.



I have created two social networks of my own at Ning.com. One is centered on my Travelography Travel News podcast (at http://travelnews.ning.com), and the other is on Responsible Travel and Sustainable Tourism (at http://responsibletravel.ning.com).


It was very easy to create these, though doing more customizing will probably take some time. In particular, I would like to add a Google Map mashup, which is found a quite a few of the social networks (such as the Travel Tips one, below). The networks with these maps appear to be from version 1 of Ning.com, and is not a standard tool built into version 2.0. In fact, if anyone has some tips on how to create a map mashup and add it to Ning.com, I would appreciate the help.



For a video introduction and tutorial to Ning.com, go to the Scoble Show blog. Also see Ning reviews on Tech Crunch and GigaOM.

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NEW (7 Sept 07): There are other web services similar to Ning that may meet your needs better. TechCrunch.com reviews nine of them here.

Step Up Travel - Sustainable Travel Does Web 2.0

"We promote responsible travel which emphasizes the importance of personal exchanges, deeper cultural understanding, genuine benefit to local people and their communities, preservation of the environment, and ultimately a more peaceful and equitable world."

Step Up Travel claims to be the first application of Web 2.0 to Responsible Travel, and I think they may be right. There are older websites devoted to responsible travel, including both resources on responsible travel issues and listings of responsible tour products. Two that I am familiar with are Planeta.com and the Big Volcano Ecotourism Centre. But both of these are in need of a major Web 2.0 face lift. And there is the National Geographic Center for Sustainable Destinations, which is sometimes related to the more commercial National Geographic Traveler. As colorful and engaging as National Geographic is, however, it lacks a social interface and comes across as more institutional and less in touch with the "real" people in a destination.

So I think, yes, Step Up Travel is the first responsible travel site on the Web 2.0 era:

• It has an attractive and clean interface,
• it provides resources to help make travel more responsible,
• it appears to be making a concerted effort to market truly local products that support the destination, and
• it has a Travel Network for "Socially-minded Travelers to Connect with local people, Get off the beaten path, and Change the face of travel."

The Travel Network will be the real test of the success of Step Up Travel in achieving its goals of linking local people with concerned and responsible tourists. I have joined and it is successful.

2007 Travvies Nominees for Best Travel Blogs

Upgrade: Travel Better - 2007 Travvies: Meet the finalists, meet the judges, and vote!

The Upgrade: Travel Better blog is running a "Best Travel Blogs" contest. I just stumbled on this and thought it was a good idea -- at least a way of spreading the word about travel blogs.

I have only heard of a few of the blogs that made the final nominations, and the nomination process seemes a bit free-wheeling. But at least its a start. And I do hope to find some time to check out at least some of the nominees.

Voting ends on February 28th. So it you are the voting type, you need to head over their quickly.

MyGreatRides.com - The Online Motorcycle Community

MyGreatRides.com - The Online Motorcycle Community

"The open road meets the Info Superhighway at MyGreatRides.com, a virtual community for people who have a passion for riding."

I am personally not a biker in any way, and this website is still in beta (you need to sign up for an invitation). However, I thought it was an interesting niche travel idea, and one that may catch on with that very devoted segment of the recreation travel and tourism market. I did a quick search and did not find anything quite like what this site may be -- though I can't really tell until it become public. The closest thing was Total Motorcycle.com, but that seemed a lot more Web 1.0.

ALSO CHECKOUT: BikersWorld.com

TripConnect.com

"TripConnect allows you to get travel advice from a network of friends and others who share your tastes and interests." (from their website)

TripConnect started up in September 2006 and seems to being going strong. It is another social travel website, like 43places.com and Wayn.com. Like those, and others, TripConnect alows members to list, review and blog about places where you have been, and asking others members about places you want to go. TripConnect also allows you to suggest and join special interest groups (see the image above), which is less common elsewhere -- though others may also have added since the last time I looked! It does seem to be lacking a map interface, which is something that is really well done on the VCarious.com website.

Personally, I found TripConnect to be simple and straightforward - and that alone can give it a considerable advantage in the growing world on social travel websites.

Mobile Video Blogging Experiment

Jesse in Belgium sent me a link to a blog where he describes how he recently used his Nokia N91 to take videos, geotag them with a GPS receiver, and upload them to a travel blog -- while traveling in Thailand.

This is probably easier to do in the Europe or the US, and probably impossible in most of the areas of Nepal that I recently traveled through (click here).

Reactive: Web 2.0 for Travel and Tourism

Reactive, a UK and Australia-based web design agency, has released a free "white paper" titled Web 2.0 for Travel and Tourism. The white paper is a good summary of different aspects of Web 2.0 and examples of companies and websites that are using them. Each category (listed below) is discussed in three sections: (1) Basics, (2) How does it relate to the tourism and travel industry?, and (3) Examples. The major Web 2.0 categories are (from their blog):

• Blogging (Starwood, Eurostar and STA Travel)
• Podcasting (Lonely Planet, Orbitz, Virgin Atlantic, The Independent and Heartbeat guides)
  
• Social networking and user generated content (TripAdvisor, Yahoo, Contiki and Sheraton)
  
• Online video (YouTube, Travelistic and MGM Grand Las Vegas)
  
• RSS (Expedia, STA Travel, Virgin Holidays, Orbitz, and Conde Nast)
  
• Tagging (del.icio.us, Flickr and Travbuddy)
  
• Mash-ups and Open API’s (Locale, Virtual Tourism, Blogabond, 43 Places and TripAdvisor)
  
• Wikis (Wikitravel, World66 and TripAdvisor)
  
• AJAX (Kayak, Sidestep, Farecast and Google Maps)

You can request a copy of the white paper (.PDF) file from Reactive's blog.

ebookers.com's Travel Calendar

The UK-based online travel agency, ebookers.com has just introduced a new, downloadable desktop "Travel Calendar." This seems to be a first, at least for Travel 2.0 applications. You can use the online version of the calendar, but the preferred approach is to download it to your desktop to you can more easily personalize it with your own entries and access it off-line. The "travel" part of the calendar includes special events from around the world, National Geographic-like travel photographs, and, of course, special travel deals and contests that are pushed to the calendar from ebookers.com. You can customize the calendar to some degree and can print it.

You need to register with ebookers.com to to download or access the calendar online. Personally, I am not willing to register and install a program on my computer so I can have advertisements pushed to me. If I were a heavy user of ebookers.com, I might consider it -- maybe, maybe not. Either way, it is an interesting way to create a user relationship with a travel company, including user generated customization. It kind of reminds me of Yahoo Travel's Trip Planner. If successful, and I think it probably will be, I think we will see more Travel 2.0 calendaring in the future.

Tourism and Social Media Class at NAU

I have added Social Media to my Spring 2007 class, "Planning for Sustainable Tourism". The class is taught 100% online. Hopefully I will not overwhelm the more technologically challenged students in the class! Click on the title above to go to the current version of the class overview. Registration information can be NAU Distance Learning.

OVERVIEW of PL 376 for Spring 2007
- January 16 - May 11, 2007

Click here for Syllabus

Topic Groups: Each student will be assigned to one of the following three groups at the start of the semester. Students will be given the opportunity to switch groups later in the semester. The Final Project will be related to the topic of the group. A couple of sample topics for each group is shown below.

1. Sustainable Tourism and Money
   • Promoting Destinations and Sustainability Online
   • Monetizing Sustainable Travel and Tourism Websites, Blogs and Podcasts
2. Sustainable Tourism and the Environment
   • Social Networking for the Environment
   • Online Environmental Education
3. Sustainable Tourism and Community (Physical and Digital)
   • Online Citizen Participation / Political Activism
   • Virtual Communities and Real Communities

CLASS SCHEDULE - Please See the LEARNING MODULES and CALENDAR for Actual Assignments and Due Dates

This Schedule is Under Construction, though it will probably not change much.

Week		Points
Module 1 - Intro to Class, Sustainability, and Social Media
1-2	Class Intro Assignment: Tourism Development Issues	75
3	Sustainable Development and Tourism	75
4	Social Media and Tourism	75
5	Planners and Planning for Tourism	75
6	Sustainable Tourism, Planning and Social Media	75
7	Midterm Exam #1	100
Module 2 - Tourism Impacts (using collaborative blogs)
8	Economic Impacts of Tourism	75
9	Social Impacts of Tourism	75
10	Environmental Impacts of (and on) Tourism	75
11	Topic Group Wiki Projects: Resources for Manging Tourism Impacts, Greening the Tourism Economy, or Tourism Planning for People	75
12		75
13	Midterm Exam #2	100
Module 3 - Social Media and Destination Marketing
14	Final Project: Place Promotion with Social Media (website creation, podcasting, and other Web 2.0 Travel Tools; there is no final exam)	75
15		75
16		100
	Total Points (subject to change)	1200

Definitions: Social Media - Social Software - New Media

Social Software Tools that will be used in this class, include:

• Message/Discussion Boards (we will use this in Blackboard-Vista)
• Websites (this will be part of the final project, most student will use the simple online web creator at Weebly.com, or the free domain service from Microsoft Live)
• Wikis (at a minimum, there will be one wiki for each of the Topic Groups above)
• Social Bookmarking (e.g., Del.icio.us - optional)
• Blogs (potentially including video and photo blogging; at a minimum there will be one collaborative group blog for each of the three Topic Groups above)
• Podcasts ( this will be part of Final Project, and if it is good enough I will put it out on my Geography for Travelers podcast - with your permission, of course; this will also be shared with student at the University of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia)
• Virtual Reality (optional; can you promote a destination through Second Life? want to try?)
• Social Networks (all students will be required to join and report on a travel-related social network)

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Trippermap.com - Making Flickr.com Geotags Easy!

I got an email today from some place called Trippermap.com. At first I thought it was spam and almost deleted it. But instead I opened it a took a look. -- and I am glad I did. Trippermap.com used to be called Flickrmap.com, and I do recall signing up for their service a while ago -- a little before Flickr.com added its own geotagging function. However, at that time I did not really feel like going through and adding geotags to my many Flickr pro account photos -- which now numbers almost 22,000 (most of which are "public").

Well, apparently the Trippermap folks have been updating their tools and I think the current version is great! What they sent me in the mail was a link to my Trippermap, which automatically locates any photo that I have tagged with a city and country. Not all my photos have that, but many do -- and I think it would be quite easy to add those tags to sets of photos in Flickr. I copied the code from the Tippermap site and plugged into my homepage (near the bottom) and now I have a nice size map tagged with icons for many of my public photos , along with a photo bar and java-based viewing function. I have tried a few other Flickr photo bars, but never really liked the results. This is the first one that I will probably keep on my website!

In addition to the basic city and country tag approach to locating photos, Trippermap also provides a Google Earth tool that allows you to use satellite images/maps to locate one or more photos more precisely, and then add the latitude and longitude coordinates direct to your Flickr site photo for searching and viewing using Flickr's map link. A video Tutorial is provided on the Trippermap.com on how to do this.

The free version of Trippermap only comes with a blank outline map of the world, on which photo icons appear, and only shows 200 Flickr photos. Trippermap Premium costs $9.75 year and includes full color Google Maps, all your photos, and Trip Route/Itinerary creation by drawing lines from one photo icon to the next. (Each icon, by the way, can include an unlimited number of photos.) They convinced me to go for the Premium account.


NEW: After posting the blog above, I received an email about Panoramio.com you can geolocate your photos via drag and drop interface and using Google Maps and you can watch uploaded photos inside Google Earth with a KML file (http://www.panoramio.com/panoramio.kml)." - I visited the site, but you cannot really tell what it does without registering, which I was not ready to do (and there was no Bugmenot.com). However, there were some cool sample travel maps on their blog page, and you can also search without registering (type in the name of a place to get a map with geotagged photos).

"Web 2.0: Too much of a good thing?" - Or Not Yet Enought?

Charles Leocha, publisher of the Tripso.com travel travel news and commentary site, recently posted an item titled "Web 2.0: Too much of a good thing?" that readers of this blog might find of interest. (You can also click on the title of this blog to go to his article.)

I read through his "article" (it is not a commentable blog) a couple of days ago and have been troubled by it since. He basically defines "Web 2.0" as user-generated websites, and cites two major uses of Web 2.0 for travel and tourism: sites where users rate places, and sites where users share travel experiences. He then cautions that both rating and sharing sites can be manipulated for insidious or untrustworthy commercial purposes, citing examples from MySpace.com and Sony Pictures -- not the most trustworthy spaces on the Internet, in my opinion.

Personally, I found the definition of Web 2.0 and the examples provided to be very narrow. Two key elements missing are (1) the community and social aspects of Web 2.0, which includes the importance of reputation and trust, and (2) the rich Internet user interfaces and applications (see Web 2.0 on Wikipedia).

Hotel ratings are one of the oldest, and still not very sophisticated, examples of Web 2.0 that Charles Leocha discusses. In fact, I am barely able to to even include TripAdvis0r.com in the realm of Web 2.0 -- it just feels more like a Web 1.0 free-for-all, lacking a real sense of community. I agree with Charles Leocha that it leaves the user with a sense of “Who can I trust?” I think that this is because its user base is so large (over 5 million reviews), that every possible opinion on any place can be found there. It lacks the strength of a Web 2.0 long tail niche community of like-minded users. In my opinion, TripAdvisor could use a major Web 2.0 work over -- more in the direction of 43Places.com. However, with their current use rates, I doubt that they have any incentive to do that!

Is Web 2.0 too much of a good thing? In my opinion, Travel 2.0 is in its infancy. Examples of websites that are exploring and pushing travel and tourism in the direction of user communities and rich interfaces are found in the postings on this blog.

Travel Videos - Coming to a PC near you now!

Travel videos appear to be the hottest thing on Travel 2.0 websites! This really hit me when, in two days I received announcement of new travel videos from the discount travel agency, Travelzoo.com and from the social travel site Tripmates.com.

• Travel Zoo Unleasehed Travel Videos currently has three 20 minute long videos up: Washington DC, Atlantic City NJ, and Lower Manhattan NY. These have a professional polish, some of which are hosted by budding celebrities.
  
  
• Tripmates' Trip Flix videos are uploaded by site members, and, or course, are much shorter and less professional. It is more of a Youtube.com experience, though probably more focused on sharing destination experiences.
  
• -- Also like this is ZoomAndGo.com
• -- And a note from Indra: VCarious.com also has a Travel Video service. Users can upload their own travel videos, along with their photos. Videos and photos can be attached to the journals and travel guides. Everything can be explored using maps.
  

There are, however, a bunch of other sites with travel videos, include YouTube.com, the recent $1.6 billion sale of which has probably prompted this sudden rush to enter the video marketplace. Among them are:

• TurnHere: Short Films, Cool Places - "Free video guides for travel, restaurants, hotels, local events & music". Turn Here is very much place-based. Its professional and semi-professionally produced videos are organized around destinations. The major ones are the San Francisco Bay area, New York metro area, and the Los Angeles metro area. Other cities are also listed, though with fewer films. The videos are really nice -- better than most of my home videos. -
  
  
• Travelistic: Videos for Travelers - "We host all kinds of travel videos, including user uploads, professional content, and tourist board videos". You can search videos on this site by Tags, Places (from a google map that shows the number of videos for each country), and People (that is, the people who made the video).

I did a quick search for other travel video websites and came up with a bunch of them. Many are commercial sites that sell travel videos, and which I am not really interested in covering here. Free sites include a number of destination convention and visitor bureau sites. Some others that are worth checking out are:

• Discovery Channel Video Tours of US National Parks (using Google Earth)
• Travelago.com - Similar to TurnHere - lists itself as having one of the largest collections of destination and attraction videos
  
• TravelRapidly.com - Videos on a wide range of attractions in Arizona (if you are planning a visit to my home state!)

EveryTrail - GPS and Photo Travel Blogging

If you are into GPS, then Everytrail.com is fairly simple concept. If you are not into GPS, you may become more interesting after checking out this interesting website.

Everytrail.com allows users to mashup their GPS tracks and geotag them with photos and short comments. Comments are indeed quite short, so it is not really a full travel blogging application. Instead, the focus is on sharing your treks with the world on a Google Map -- preferably a satellite image. The image draw as a line tracing the route, and the user adds photo and text icons. Zooming in and out is a breeze, making this a is a very nice way to virtually experience a place!

The treks that were up on the site when I visited seemed to be very limited in the number of photos and comments that they included. I wonder if there is a limit. I tend to take a lot of photos on most any trip that I take -- several hundred a day, of which I keep about half. It seems that a high density of photos taken at ground level, combined with the Google satellite image, and short text comments, could go a long way to provide a virtual travel experience. Visitors can also comment on the trails.

Evertrail.com is a fun site, worth checking out.