Blog homeAn area that is currently underserved by travel websites (and startups) is functionality that enables users to share their post travel experiences with fellow travellers, friends, family and “the public” in a simple way.
Yes there are thousands of forums – and many travel websites let users put up photos, trip blogs etc…. but I wonder whether this requires too much investment (of time) by users in order to gain mainstream traction (at least with the existing generation of adult users) – unless the user is already registered and part of that website’s community. I don’t know – and would love some feedback. Perhaps large social networks negate the need for specific functionality as they support this need? Perhaps websites like WAYN fill the void sufficiently?
One new website, recently launched, that aims to fill this gap is tripNtale - Here is an example journey through India with nice music too (click on the slideshow over on the right hand side). The proposition is that a simple to use, single purpose, website for sharing travel memories is what users are looking for.
An alternative to this approach is to use something like slideshare.net – slideshare lets you share powerpoint presentations and add music (or words as audio etc). For example here is a trip that someone has done to Ghana.
When you mix this capability with geotagging (like Youtube now lets you geotag videos) you can make an interesting proposal. I was at the Future of Web Applications (FOWA London) conference the other day and listened to Heather Champ, community manager of Flickr (Yahoo). Their concern when they introduced geotagging was that they were going to get “porn islands” – islands in the Pacific (or wherever) where users would submit photos and geotag to a specific location…. that would become open knowledge within communities that are into that kind of activity. It didn’t happen though, so I have been told. (I don’t go looking for that kind of thing!)
Any other memory sharing tools out there? Any neat ways to monetise these websites?
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Interesting site Alex, although I fail to see how it is more of a ‘post travel’ experience relating site than any of the other travel experience sharing sites out there? We actually started as a ‘post travel experience’ site, as it was aimed at reuniting lost travel friends originally. Functions like our travel help feature also rely heavily on the post travel experience.
The ‘post travel experience’ can be pretty important and I know I treasure those old travelling experiences. So there is definitely somewhat of an opportunity here. One feature we launched for our blogs (and I do believe we were/still are the first and only) is the option to download your entire travel blog (or just parts of it) as a PDF in a nicely printable format AFTER returning home (HTML is also an option). I’m not sure it fits your bill of being simple as you’d have to actually have kept a blog during your trip to make it worthwhile (and for the record I think our blogging system is pretty simple to use no matter how new to blogging you are!) but if you have kept a blog it makes for a brilliant documentation of your trip. It’s basic, but allows you to set a few things like font type, front page pic, font size etc. before saving as well. It makes for a brilliant coffee-table book complete with text/photos/comments and all! Some info on it in website link above.
As for monetizing; tough!
Hi Sam,
Yes – I am not saying that tripNtale is the best …. not at all….
I wrote about them because they are the new kids on the block – and are just focussing on one thing…. rather than making it a feature of an existing website or service. I know there are a number of good ways people can share their travel memories through existing services. Perhaps I should try to research a “top 15″ post travel websites post…. (I was rather hoping a list would form itself on this post, saving me having to research something I have not looked at in detail)
I like your blog printing thing. Have you seen my little icon over on the right column – you can print this blog as well….. I don’t know if anything I write is worth printing though!
Thanks for commenting. Alex
No worries, you gained a new subscriber in me last week some time
A top 15 of best sites to post your trip wouldn’t be bad – there’s SO many these days! There was a post on Travelfish a while ago where he compared 3 and we were included; yay!
That HP printing tool is actually pretty cool (hadn’t noticed it…)! Of course it’s not the same as being able to actually customize things like fonts etc when printing and to generate a pdf I guess it would take some work, but neat nonetheless, especially as it’s open to all visitors of the blog, not just the blog owner. We have a print stylesheet which takes care of most of that on our public blogs but it’s not really the same and you don’t get the choices you do when printing as the blog owner.
Hi Alex and Sam,
I’m so surprised to see a comment discussion about TripnTale. My name is Darwin and I’m creating TripnTale to simply make the post travel the top most priority. I believed so much in TripnTale because I’m benefiting the most out of the website myself (please check out my latest trip to Hawaii http://tripntale.com/journal.aspx?did=132). With my photos and journals (and videos in the future) for each of my previous trips, I can look back and savor the memories again, or simply send the link to my friends and families.
Aniway, I just want to say thank you for featuring TripnTale on your blog, and I will love to listen to any feedbacks you guys have so that I can improve my site better.
Hi Darwin
Thanks for commenting. My advice, for what it is worth, is keep it simple.
It would be better to do one thing well – than try to take on really large travel blogging platforms etc across multiple feature sets. In fact by NOT trying to compete with these other systems you may find it easier to form partnerships between your website and others in the future.
I would add some simple functionality to let users “pimp” their trip slideshows. For example a choice of 10 backgrounds with travel related themes (city, jungle, beach, ski etc). Another example – tie in with a music website so users can easily find appropriate theme music for their presentations – with all music navigated by trip theme.
Best wishes. Alex