Sunday 8 October 2006 by Edward.

Blogcritics.org took three weeks to survey ‘new’ types of online content, unique to the web and made possible by the web. Newpapers and TV programs online don’t make it on the list. These are avenues available to travel-related websites. Here is the start of this media content list. More types are to be added later.

Accidental content sites

IPTV

Personal/Citizen TV

Channel aggregators

Online newspapers

Content re-use

Social bookmarking

User-content TV

Corporate and political TV

New research engines

Live performance

Wikis

Games and virtuality

Classifieds

Adult

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Tuesday 26 September 2006 by Edward.

The Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp has launched their “Sound About Philly” iPOD walking tour. Audio tours take you to unusual and unknown places. Current podcasts include: My Philly, History Unplugged, and Philadelphia Flavorhoods. User-created tours are also available, such as Hands-on Fun, and Literary Philly.

What impressed my about Sound About Philly was its integration with GoogleMap. I clicked on the Philadelphia Flavorhoods podcast and was presented with ten tour segments, each displayed on GoogleMap. I love markets so I clicked on the South Philadelphia Italian Market icon, on 9th and Christian Street. “Joe Bubbles”, a long-time resident, introduces us to a cheese shopkeeper, a cookware merchant and an Italian baker (I yearn for good Italian bread!). The audio clips are more of an area presentation rather than a walking tour, such as the Toronto City Surf tour I noted in an earlier blog post. A neat feature is the “add to custom tour” button. You can create your own audio tour the visit Philadelphia.

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Friday 22 September 2006 by Edward.

A blogsite has been created between RealTravel, a social network of travel experiences, and T4G, an IT business solutions company, reports Yahoo.

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Saturday 26 August 2006 by Edward.

Evhead.com shares an Alexa ranking and his brief writeup of 30+ podcasting services. These include players such as: Libsyn, Odeo, Podomatic, PodcastPickle, Podshow, PodcastAlley, PodcastingNews, and Podcast.net.

Tourist podcasts come in several flavours: destination podcasts, podcast guides and tourism website podcasts.

Destination podcasts are those that relate to a site or event. Listen to a podcast from Tasmania, Australia, from Edinburgh, Scotland, or Galveston, Texas. Podcast guides are those audio-tours one can take while walking about, such as in Toronto, with CitySurf, in Dublin, Ireland, with iWalks, or in New York’s meat packing district with Soundwalk. Tourism website podcasts are those sites that provide regular (and irregular) podcasts on tourism topics, such as Doc Martin’s Travel Show Podcast, from Melbourne, Australia, Alan Lew’s Geography for Travelers, from Flagstaff, Arizona, and Nick and Andrea’s European iPod Traveller. A tourist podcast directory is shown at Podfeed.net.

Rule 16 “The Rule of Telling Stories”, in the book ‘The 25 Immutable Rules of Successful Tourism’ by Roger A. Brooks and Maury Forman, states that ‘Great stories make the campfire memorable’. Whether by word-of-mouth or via iPOD, the story sells the destination and unearths the nooks and crannies of the world. Great stories develop great bonds with the local community.

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Friday 11 August 2006 by Edward.

Web 2.0 for tourism, or Tourism 2.0, is about empowering the tourist, and about growing tourism. It’s about an active web — a web of actively sharing (www.triptracker.com and www.wikipedia.com), collaborating (www.1trip3.com), creating (www.ning.com), and socializing (www.myspace.com). Tourism 2.0 takes advantage of emerging internet tools such as RSS, Mashups, contextual advertising, advanced user interfaces, Podcasting, and group-forming networks.

Take Podcasting for example. A July 2006 Canadian Podcast Listener’s Survey put together by Sequentia Communications and Caprica Interactive Marketing found:

1 The number of male and female listeners were about the same.
2 Podcasts are moving into the mainstream with babyboomers as leading adopters.
3 Canadians love Canadian-content podcasts.
4 Original, quality Podcast content is preferred, once a week, under 10-15 minutes in length, with limited advertisements as acceptable.

For those who create travel-related podcasts, these numbers are quite useful. Please, share any travel-related podcasts you come across.

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Wednesday 9 August 2006 by Edward.

Mobile users of the internet outnumbered wired users of the internet in Japan in 2005. They also accessed the web more frequently — mainly for emails and surfing — and 8.7 million of them were mobile bloggers.

Mobile-only users: 13.6 million
Wired-only users: 11.4 million
Mobile+Wired users: 48.6 million

In the UK, the Register recently reported that T-mobile’s Web and Walk users will be capped at £1 per day, with certain restrictions. Will we see a Japanese-style migration to mobile use and moblogging?

As far as tourists are concerned, initial moblog design experiments in Finland have shown mixed reviews. New Zealand surveys show that tourists want “… ways to collect their ideas and send the gathered information to others (online)”. Community-based tourist blogs have been setup. Even the ethics of a tourist blog is discussed by Florida’s Josh Hallett and Seattle’s Matt Rosenberg.

Are you interested in tourist/tourism blogging? See FAQs, some blog resources, and a listing of some travel resources blogs.

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Sunday 6 August 2006 by Edward.

Again Doc Martin’s Travel Show podcast from Melbourne made me thirsty. First it was bar-hopping with an “experimental traveller agenda”, now its a tour of six microbreweries in Melbourne.

Podcasts are part of Tourism 2.0, or Web 2.0. They enhance collaboration between the tourist and the destination. Does your destination have a travel podcast?

Get a noise-cancelling headset, have a story to tell, hookup to a Podcast service on the web and your off. Maybe take some lessons first.

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Monday 31 July 2006 by Edward.

Take your brochures, flyers, reports and newsletters, add the right amount of music or voice narration, video and animation, tap your brain cells, mix carefully, and you can create a media-rich masterpiece — a brochure, or eBrochure, that can be viewed by 500 million people on the internet.

BC Pictures creates interactive eBrochures for tourism destinations using Adobe PDF technology. Here is an eBrochure example of the Toronto CN Tower attraction in standard print format (1 Mb) and in full-media format (7.7 Mb).

Roger A. Brooks Rule 5 “The Rule of Perceived Value” tells us that ‘First impressions are lasting impressions.’ We shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, says Brooks, but we do. A brochure, or website home page, is the first clue about the character and quality of your destination. What have you done lately to enhance your image?

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Saturday 8 July 2006 by Edward.

I love Doc martin’s Travel show podcasts, broadcast from Melbourne, Australia. This week’s podcast is about “experimental travel” experiences. He sent out two of his lucky students to bar hop (actually, they probably volunteered for this experiment). The task assigned was to follow a unknown path through an evening, a path based on the favourite bar and favourite drink recommended by each pub’s bartender. Doc Martin also provides a link to Lonely Planet’s Guide to Experimental Travel.

Do you have an “experimental travel” experience to share? Do you have a travel destination podcast?

Oh, yes. Roger A. Brooks. His Rule No.9 “The rule of frontline sales” states that ‘The bellman does more than just open doors.’ Train every frontline employee about every attraction or site in town, and have each adopt one destination in which they become the local expert.

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Wednesday 5 July 2006 by Edward.

Guests staying at the Sheraton Hotels & Resorts can now enter a story about their visit and have it displayed on the home page of their new website www.sheraton.com – the first hotel industry website to draw attention to guest-generated content and build an online social network.

While this form of online social networking is not new to the tourism industry (see visitPA, USA) it shows the power of bringing “word of mouth” to your tourist destination, and exemplifies the value in building online communities.

Remember, Roger A. Brooks‘ Rule 23 “The Rule of Public relations” states that ‘Bragging is more effective when someone else does it for you.’

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