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.

RealTravel.com Trip Planner Review on TechCrunch

FYI - TechCrunch.com has a good review of RealTravel.com's new trip planner. Click the title above to see what they have to say.

Farecast Expands to 75 Cities

Farecast is now available to for 75 cities! The website that predicts the best air fare prices on a given day based on historical data was previously only available for Boston and Seattle.

Farecast is basically an airline fare search engine. I am not sure just how good it is at that, and suggest that you compare it to your current favorites before you buy anything. What Farecast offers that is unique is a tool that tries to predict when the lowest prices can be found between any two cities. Unfortunately it appears that this tool only works for flights between the 75 cities that are in its database. I could not get a price on a flight between Phoenix and Fairbanks, for example, because Fairbanks is not in its database.

However, this is a big move up from the original two cities that previously made the site a curiosity, but not very useful. The intend to continue to grow the database, and I will look forward to the day when they also add international cities!

Tripmates.com: an American "Donkey Friends"?

I recently attended a tourism research conference in Singapore, some of the papers from which are appearing on the Geography for Travelers podcast. One of the things that I learned about, through two different researchers, was the Chinese concept of Donkey Friends. In Mandarin Chinese, the words Travel and Donkey have the same sound ("lyu"), though the tones are different. Because of this, the word Donkey has come to applied to a distinctly Chinese for or "backpacker" travel.

Using a social software travel website, the Head Donkey posts a notice that he or she is going to organize a trip on a certain date to a certain destination, and asks if anyone wants to join. Other Donkeys sign up by responding to this post. The trips are self organized and catered to save money, and everyone has their backpack. Like other tour groups, there are expected standards of behavior and role differentiations (some of which are along gendered lines), and people develop friendships that last beyond the one trip. Apparently the Chinese media has cautioned about the the potential dangers of traveling with strangers. Searching for information in English on Donkey Friend Travel online, however, did not result in anything that I could find.

This type of travel has not, to my knowledge, been very common in the US. Tripmates. com, however, may hope to change that. Tripmates is a new social travel site that share a lot in common with other social travel sites, such as 43Places.com, VCarious.com and MyLifeOfTravel.com, all of which I have used in the past, and the new TripConnect.com. This includes asking and sharing information about destinations and blogging about trips. What is different with Tripmates is an explicit focus on meeting new people. According to the website you can:

• Find a trip buddy so you don't have to travel alone
• Organize group trips with our exclusive Tripvite feature
• Meet locals or people traveling to your destination

There is an interest in this kind of travel, at least among a segment of the population in the west (see, for example, CouchSurfing.com). It will be interesting to see if traveling with Donkey Friends catches on outside of China.

FYI -Tripmates has also been reviewed breifly on Mashables.com

NEW: 6/21/07 - I see that TripMates has changed its name to TripUp.com - though the concept seems to be the same.

WAYN.COM - Where Are You Now?

WAYN.COM - Log your trips - see who is where - make new friends

If you have a ton of friends who travel all over the world, or if you want a ton of friends who travel all over the world, then WAYN (Where Are You Now) is probably just what you need! Personally, I like my small group of friends, who happen to live all over the world, but I do not feel any need to know exactly where everyone is at any one point in time. However, if you do want to know that, and if they want to let you know that, then WAYN is what you need.

Personally, I am a bit skeptical that people travel all that much, and that they really want to let all their friends and the whole world know every time they make a trip anywhere. Or that they are open to meeting strangers everywhere they go in the world.

But then I am an old guy, who does not do MySpace nor Second Life.

Actually, WAYNE kind of reminds me of 43Places.com, but is much more socially oriented. It is built around your friends, who you can notify about your travels, search to see where they are in the world, and SMS to their cell phone (as well as non-member cell phones). The focus on friends (current and potential) gives it a MySpace-ish feel -- more so than 43Places, which is very social, but feels more focused on places than WAYNE. WAYNE does have place discussion (a core feature of 43Places), and it allows you to upload trip photos.

While it may not be my cut of tea, it is certainly interesting -- so check it out.

Fresh Logic Atlas

Atlas - powered by Fresh Logic Studios

The Fresh Logic Atlas is an Ajax-like and Google-like mapping site. There are three tabs at the top right of the screen:

• Start: Directions, Email (send an email to Fresh Logic), Search, Toolbox (zoom and map type), Defaults, and Help
• Features: Locate with pins Blogs, Events (from Eventful.com), Gas Prices, Movie Theaters, Traffic Notices, and Wifi Hotspots
• Services: GPS to locate yourself and get direction (beta; requires registration and a GPS receiver coupled with a Windows Mobile 5 pda or phone)

The map of Phoenix, Arizona below shows the Features bar open in the right corner, with Traffic and Event showing on the map. The Traffic notice list is open, while the Event list is closed. Information on one of the Traffic points and on one of the Event points are shown in more detail. The navigation Toolbox is also open.



The Fresh Look Atlas is graphically the slickest and sophisticated mapping tool that I have seen. It also provides useful information for both residents and visitors to a place. Unfortunately it is currently limited to the US and Canada. And it can be somewhat sluggish, even on my DSL connection -- it appears to be doing a lot of processing! Using it over a dialup would probably be excruciating. Registration gives you additional features (though I could not see just how this was different from not registering). The Fresh Logic Atlas does not work with Safari for Mac OS X.

Tags: map,mapping,travel,events,gas prices,movies,wifi,atlas,ajax,google maps,directions,gps,location,Fresh Logic Atlas

Yahoo! Map and Directions on your iPod

iPod Directions : Use your iPod Video, Nano or Photo as a Yahoo! Maps directions viewer!

My son has an iPod, but I have resisted. I do, however, recognize their overwhelming popularity, and do not deny Apple its great iPod success. o, now all of you who own an iPod Video, Nano or Photo can easily download Yahoo! Map directions to your player -- which could be more convenient, and maybe cheaper, than a GPS unit.

From the website:

"Yahoo Maps and the popular iPod portable MP3 player are used together to bring you an exciting online service called iPod-Directions. What is it? iPod-Directions is a powerful step-by-step directions saving tool that will export online driving directions from results by Yahoo Maps and import them into your iPod. It’s an easy solution for getting Yahoo Map directions saved and displayed onto any iPod Video, Nano or Photo, and without the need of additional software!"

Tags: ipod,map,mapping,Yahoo,directions,travel

Sheraton Becomes Social with New Website

"Sheraton Hotels & Resorts has launched the new Sheraton.com – termed as the first hotel industry website to embrace social media and feature user generated content."

Well,I am impressed. The new Sheraton.com website is a very alive and exciting site. The globe is definitely cool, and inviting. And it looks like quite a few contributors have already added thier peronal Sheraton stories (I think the site when live a month ago), though there are still a few "Be the first" links. I bet we will be seing a lot more of this from the big travel industry players in the coming year.

You can read a short story about this on eyefortravel.com.

Next wave of travel websites feels like MySpace | csmonitor.com

Next wave of travel websites feels like MySpace | csmonitor.com

This is a Christian Science Monitor article on Travel 2.0 (Web 2.0 applied in the travel sector). The article is somewhat narrowly focused on TripAdvisor.com, though it does mention Farecast.com (great idea, if you live in Boston or Seattle, useless for the rest of the world) and Gusto.com (not one I am familiar with). Personally, I think the hottest Travel-Mypace is 43Places.com, though I personally am currently using MyLifeOfTravel.com and Vicarious.com.

CLICK HERE to go to read about and listen to my recent "Travel 2.0" conference presentation on my Geography for Travelers podcast.

The SoundSeeing World of Audio Travel

The SoundSeeing World of Audio Travel

A soundseeing tour is an audio recording of the sounds of a place. There is typically no narrative voice, so it helps to have a website that tells you what the file is about (or to have the file properly coded to show this in the file information). Soundseeing tours are a fairly popular form of podcast, though they usually supplement more traditional podcasts. At least that is the way I have used them in my Geography for Travelers podcast (listen, for example, to my Hawaii episode).

Below are the two best sources for soundseeing tours that I have found. If you know of others, please send me the links (travelgeographer@gmail.com).

SoundTransit.nl

"SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography."

This is a database of soundseeing tours from around the world. SoundTransit.nl gives you two ways of listening to soundseeing .mp3 files. The first is to search by country and place, which results in a listing and description of contributed sound files.

The second version is more of a random file generator, although that is not very obvious from the description. What it does is it allows you to "Book a Transit" by identifying a start and end place, and indicate 1 to 5 stopovers. The site then generates several sample itineraries of sound files that one might encounter by following this transit. It also creates a map showing the transit route and the locations of the soundseeing files. However, the transits actually make no logical sense. I entered Montreal and Cuauhtemoc, Mexico, and the itinerary included Portland (Oregon), Yamaguchi (Japan), and New Plymouth (New Zealand). The site design is very Web 2.0/Ajaxy, so I am guessing that this randomness is intentional.

SoundTransit.nl is a collaraborative website, and those who wish to post their sound files to the site submit it to the site owners by email with a description. As of this writing, some 225 different people had submitted sound files and were listed in the Artists section. There is no RSS feed, though there are plans to start one in the future.

Soundseeing Podcasts from the AudioCollective.net

"This podcast is here to aggregate the best of soundseeing podcasts. There are so many great ones and their need to be a central place for finding these gems. Anyone can submit his or her podcast for addition to the feed."

This is more of an open source site for podcasters who play around with soundseeing tours from time to time. They can submit their soundseeing podcast episode here, and anyone who subscribes to the SoundseeingPodcast.com's RSS feed will get it. The result is an incredible diversity of sounds. It looks like there were 42 postings when I checked the site. It also appears to be a way for podcasts to broaden their name exposure, which means that these are experienced podcasters who are posting these audio files. As mentioned above, just hope that the file is properly coded so you can find out just what you are listening to, without having to always check back on the website.

--------
UPDATES (17Aug07)
1- HearingPlaces.org is a new US-based website for soundscenes.
2- I recently posted a soundseeing tour of Danxiashan in China
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GeoBirds - Your Online Birding Community!

GeoBirds - Your Online Birding Community!

Birding? Tourism? You bet!

Ecotourism is one of the fastest growing niche tourism segments in the world. And Birding is the fastest growing segment of the ecotourism market. Personally, I am not a birder, though I did find that watching the Fairy Penguins return from the sea after sunset on Phillip Island (Melbourne, Australia) last month was absolutely thrilling! (see my travel blog here)

GeoBirds.com is a website for:
(1) Identifying birds - I often wonder about the birds in my backyard; there is also a bird identification game
(2) Sharing sitings of rare birds - This is more for the pro-bird watcher, and includes links to birding clubs!
(3) Learning about birds - an online field guide and news about birds around the world

And so, ummm, how is this Web 2.0? Geobirds.com is a social sharing site and birding is a longtail niche travel market, so I think it fits the definition.

Hmmm, maybe I will try a little birding on my next nature-based vacation. . . .

Tags: ecotourism,birds,birding,geobirds.com,tourism,recreation,education,nature

VCarious Travel adds Google Maps-based Photo and Journal Searching

Explore the World | VCarious Travel

The travel blog and social software website, Vicarous.com, has recently added the ability to scan over a Google Map to find photos, journals (travel blogs/diaries), and wiki guides for different parts of the world.

The feature is still in beta, but seems to work well (other than being a bit overloaded on their server when they first put the feature up a few days ago). You can zoom in on the map to filter out photos and journals for geographic areas you are not interested in. And you can filter the photos by set category tags, such as Oceans, Landscapes, Cities, Wildlife and Travelers, or by typing locations or photo titles.

The photos are not very large, however, probably due to the fact the Vicarious allows unlimited uploads and its upload tool allows you to pull entire folders off your computer and from a Flickr.com account. It is possible to get to a larger version of each photo, but is takes several clicks and is not intuitive. (By comparison, MyLifeOfTravel.com has nice, big photos readily viewable on its travel blogs.) And, of course, for the photos to show up on the map Explore page, the photos need to be tagged to a location. Vicarious allows you to locate all the photos uploaded as a batch in one simple step, and allows you to title each photo at the time of upload in a very quick and easy way.

The wiki guides allow similar filtering and searches, while the journals can be searched by "concepts" only, which I assume are words that appear in the journals. As a relatively new website, Vicarious does not have the entire world covered, and only has about 350 members listed on its site. I must say, though, that Vicarious has gone through an entire facelift since the first time I visited the site a couple of months ago. They have also addes a route-tracing map tool (connecting the destinations on trip with a line), which I had not seen before (though it is not as flexible as a similar tool on MyLifeOfTravel, which allows several locations to be placed in each blog entry).

The new map searching capability on Vicarious.com is really nice and is an attractive tool for those of us who take LOTS of photos on their travels that they want to share. Check it out by clicking on the blog title above.

Tags: vcarious,photo,search,map search,travel journal,travel blog,google maps,wiki guides,guidebooks

Wifi Free Spot.com - free wifi hotspots worldwide

WiFi Free Hotspots.com

You pretty much have to be online to access Web 2.0. For me, this has become the single biggest hassle of traveling! After my recent trip (to Australia, blogged here), I have sworn to only use hotels that can provide high speed Internet access, preferably wireless.

And of course, wouldn't it be great if it were free, as well?

Well, WifiFreeSpot.com lists airports, hotels, campgroungs, vacation rentals, coffee shops, bookstores, and other places that offer free wifi access. This site is likely to become a must-use resource for my future travel planning. It is part of JiWire.com, but I found it much easier to use than JiWire's hotspot finder, which focuses more on paid hotspots. (JiWire does have an interesting wifi newsletter that I susbcribe to.)

BTW - You should really install a personal firewall when using public wireless access points, and even hotel ethernet wired access points. I use the free Comodo Personal Firewall, which is discussed on the Leading Edge Technology podcast. I only turn it on when I am traveling.

Tags: wifi,free,hotspots,hotspot,travel,airports,hotels,campgrounds,wireless

Other Web 2.0 Related Travel Blogs

Of course, why should I think that I am the only one out there blogging about online innovations in travel and tourism? Here are a two more that I just learned about and which cross many of the same boundaries that I do, though each in our own way. Check these out:

Les Explorers - by Claude Benard
<http://www.lesexplorers.com/> covers a wide range of travel and tourism, and while I do not know any French, I still find it of considerable interest

Hotel Blog - by Guillaume Thevenot
<http://www.hotel-blogs.com> had a focus on the hotel and hospitality industry, though not exclusively so

Let me know if there are any other worthy blogs out there, and I will add them to this blog entry.

Tags: Travel,Tourism,Blogs,Bloggers,Web 2.0,Travel News

TripHub and Triporama - Group Travel Planners

What could be more social than traveling witha a group of friend and/or relatives to a fun destination? Well there are two (that I know of) free social software websites that help you to start developing the social relationships for such a journey online.

Triporama.com
- According to the webiste: "Plan a Group Trip -- Create your trip, then use our tools to:
* store and share travel research; * manage invites; * conduct polls; * coordinate travel; ...and more."

TripHub.com
- According to the website, you can "Easily plan and organize your trip for free! -- Create a Trip Home Page; Invite people to join the trip; Send Invitations; and Discuss & Share Plans"

Triporama currently appears to have a few more features, but TripHub may be easier to use. I suspect that competition will drive them to each add more tools to one-up the other. Both provide tips and ideas for group travel.

From my own experience, making group travel arrangements is not the easiest thing in the world to do in a smooth and painless way. So if you are given that responsibility, you might want to check these two sites out for tips and help to ease your planning efforts.

Tags: travel,tourism,group,group travel,trip organization,trips,triphub,triporama

Latitudes Magazine - Travel Attitudes Magazine for Broadband

Latitudes Magazine - Travel Attitudes Magazine for Broadband

This is National Geographic 2.0 -- a gorgeous online travel photo magazine with Italian flare and built for online viewing. A broadband connection is necessary and the latest issue (#14) is 181 pages of sharp full color photos and animations.

Issue #14 covers Columbia, Myanmar, The Berkshire Hills (Massachusetts), Mt. Etna, Berlin, Croatia, Tuscany and Salina (Italy). Look for animations (some hidden) in some of the photos. Basic Travel information and links are provided at the end of each photo essay.

The magazine comes in Italian and English versions. You can subscribe to their newsletter to get announcement of each new issue. The have a discussion forum, but with no moderators it is almost entirely filled with spam! They must be graphic artists first, and web masters last.

Very cool! - Check it by clicking on the title above.

Tags: travel,tourism,magazine,geography,photography,photos,lattitudes,magazines,web20

Online Travel Maps - a mini review

Online Travel Maps - a mini review

The folks over at TechCrunch (a new media blog site) have been comparing the different map search engines, including maps.Google.com, maps.Yahoo.com, Microsoft (local.live.com), maps.Ask.com and Mapquest.com. The competition is heated and new feature rollouts make comparisons a moving target. Their "winner" (in April 2006) was maps.Yahoo.com, which includes detailed traffic information for major cities and an easy to use interface that includes listing of services, restaurants and other places of potential interest to travelers.

Click Here to see the full TechCrunch assessment, which includes a table that compares the major features that are offered (and not) by each map.

Taking a quick look at all of the different sites listed above, I agree that the maps.Yahoo.com interface has the best combination of usefulness and usability. However, I found that maps.Ask.com has the nicest looking color aerial images of Flagstaff, AZ, which made finding my house much easier on their website than any other. And that oldie but goodie Mapquest.com, which still has a very Web 1.0 static map, had the most accurate street maps of Flagstaff.

To compete, Microsoft has added live traffic indicators to its maps, though it listed far fewer road incidents in Phoenix, AZ, than did the Yahoo map viewed at the same time. And Microsoft has a preview site of for Streetside (at http://preview.local.live.com/; also reviewed at TechCrunch). This site shows front and side photo views of streets in downtown San Francisco and Seattle. Pretty cool, especially if you are familiar with one of those two places (I found my old apartment in SFO!), though the interface is a bit clunky, kind of like playing a very old vide car driving game.

Personally, I think any of them will do a good job in getting you from point A to point B, but these new toys can be fun!

p.s. - This review also appears on my Geography for Travelers blog.

Tags: maps, mapping, travel, tourism, geography, aerial images, comparisons, maps.yahoo.com, maps.ask.com, mapquest, streetside, techcrunch

iAudioguide.com & Other Podcast Walking Tours

I recently received an email from Torsten Peters at iAudioguide.com with updated information about their free downloadable audio walking tours, which currently cover London, Barcelona, and Paris. Interestingly, he included a couple of competitor urls and told me that if I wanted more he would send them. I said yes, and boy was I surprised at the number of links he sent me. At some point, when I have some free time (ha!), I will write a review article on this topic, possibly for my journal, Tourism Geographies. But in the meantime, I wanted to share the links with all of you. Torsten noted that iAudioguide.com is free, while most of the others charge a fee for their downloads. If you know of any others that I should add to this list, send them to me (travelgeographer@gmail.com) and I will add them to this list.

Thanks to Torsten!

BTW - What should we be calling these? Auidoguides? Audiotours? Podguides? Podtours? ??

www.iAudioguide.com
www.soundtrek.org/ - Bangkok
www.podguides.net
www.parisaudioguides.com
www.bluebrolly.co.uk
www.dorlingkindersley-uk.co.uk/static/cs/uk/11/travel/podcast.html
www.visitscotland.com/sitewide/edinburghpodcast
www.talkingstreet.com/
www.footnotesaudiowalks.co.uk/
www.audiocitytour.com/
www.ijourneys.com/
www.ricksteves.com/news/travelnews/0602/audiotour.htm
NEW: Passport Guides for the PSP: http://psppassport.com/

related articles
www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/resources/st_travelswithipod0604/ipod.html
technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,16559,1681516,00.html
www.nytimes.com/2005/05/28/arts/design/28podc.html?ex=1274932800&en=db1ced6873dcc4b6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
www.macnewsworld.com/story/50096.html
www.csmonitor.com/2006/0412/p13s01-litr.html
www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,65945,00.html
tech.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1089780.php/Portable_tourist_guides_now_in_service

Tags: Travel, Tourism, Guides, Podcasts, Audioguides, Audiotours, Podguides, Podtours, Audio, Podcasts, Tours

DIY Free Passport (and Visa) Photos at ePassportPhoto.com

Save your money! Don't spend the outrageous fees at Kinkos for passport and visa photos. This websites helps you create your own.

I especially like this list of 10 Do's and don'ts for passport photos -- The MANY Sample Photos are both informative and humorous!

Check it out at: ePassportPhoto.com

From the webiste:

• ePassportPhoto is the Internet passport photos booth - empowering people around the world to make free and valid passport photos.

Tags: Passports, Photos, Portraits, DIY, Visa