BuddyMapping. One cool GoogleMap tourism tool.

Sunday 20 August 2006 by Edward.

How would you like to put the coolest guest map on your website? BuddyMapping lets you place a Google Map on your website then have your online visitors leave their placemark with comments and photos for others to see — perfect for blogs, online forums, groups, and tourist destination sites. “The tourist destination”, notes site owner/developer Ben Gotow, “is the perfect candidate for a ‘buddy map’. A company could use a map to show popular destinations in an area, with pictures and links to more information. Visitors to the page could add their own favourite spots and make comments … or could use the map as a guestbook and let tourists write about the places to which they’ve been.”

Features of BuddyMaps include live-updating, links and banners for your website, views via Google Earth, a browser dashboard widget, and a map view counter. Placemarks can be coded to match your site’s colour scheme. What started as a way to connect friends has grown within about 3 months to over 1,500 maps and 11,000 place markers.

I examined the map posted at BuddyMapping.com. There were 270 people listed on the map. I contacted one of the entries — RV-dreams.com. An email from the site owners told me that they had 340 entries on their Buddy map in just the first week. They call their map the RV-Dreams Family Map. Their map was covered with markers from all over continental USA. Not all location names are accepted yet when creating a placemark, especially outside the USA. With time, I’m sure this shortcoming will be resolved.

I created a BuddyMap link for this website, TheTouristExperience.com. Check it out. Try adding your placemark and some comments on my map.

The BuddyMapping goal is to be “simple , clean and easy to use”, notes Gotow. This required an incredible amount of work, to ensure an efficient site in the popular browsers, he adds. Gotow has lots of plans (and lots of ideas from his growing fan base). Expect to see multiple-tag entries and migration of GoogleMaps to user sites in future.

Rule 17 “The Four-Times Rule”, in the book ‘The 25 Immutable Rules of Successful Tourism’ by Roger A. Brooks and Maury Forman, tells us that ‘The shortest distance between two pints is a good time’. People will visit your destination if it will maintain their interest four times longer than it took them to get there. In other words, if your destination will keep visitors busy for two hours, expect most of your traffic to come from within 30 minutes away — the ‘four times rule’. For tourist websites I will equate that to “site stickiness” and “site revisit potential”. Will a Buddy Map improve your tourist destination site stickiness and revisit potential? As Ben Gotow suggests, “try it and find out”.

Posted in Gadget/Idea/Webtool, Maps, AFTER the visit | No Comments »