A few days ago, I said I was using Google Notebook to build a weekly summary of selected entries on different blogs about travel (spanish only). And I came up with and idea: to build a series of entries dedicated to Internet tools that can be useful to travellers; for example, to collect and publish information. I have no idea how regularly will I publish this section, but I already have in mind some more applications to check.

Not let’s go to Google Notebook. Basically, it’s a plugin for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox navigators. The idea is to work as some sort of clips collector. But at the same time, it’s an interesting application for those who want to collect information for future trips. To use it, you just need to download the plugin and have a Google account, for example, the one you use to access Gmail. Once installed, you have to restart the navigator.

Let’s suppose we want to save information about an specific destination. For this example, I’ll use Tomas Jofre, a town in the province of Buenos Aires, that stands out for its parrillas and restaurants. For this, first, we open the notebook -you’ll see it in the bottom bar of the navigator- and create a new folder, let’s call it “Tomas Jofre”. Then we start to navigate in Google and find a note in La Nacion newspaper which talks about this destination.

We decide we’d like to save the full text of the note. For this, we select the entire material we wish to save, and right click, and in the context menu we choose “Note This” to add it to our page.

We’ll keep adding the texts we find, and they’ll all be stored in the same page, as you can see in this example.

While it’s an useful service, one we can use to make “clips” in the useful pages we visit, Google Notebook has some not so positive things. The first one is that it doesn’t allow collaboration among users. That is, it’s not possible, at least for now, to have many people interact to create only one page. The other thing is that you have to be careful to keep the folder where we want to send the clip, open; otherwise, we’ll have to do the whole thing over.

This Google service can be a good way to collect information and share it with other users. If you have pages created in Google Notebook about travel, you can leave your contribution in the comments area.

At Jujuy.com Sergio Aramayo has pointed out twice how the argentinean newspaper Clarin, edited in Buenos Aires, had confused Tilcara with Purmamarca (see it here and here, spanish only, where in the second case the place was confused with Cafayate). And to clear any doubts on how the topic is not really important to them, they have just made the same mistake, for the third time.

clarin y el norteHosted on Zooomr

Again, they’ve published a note about Tilcara and have illustrated it with a picture of Purmamarca. Now, we can only hypothetize on the reasons of so many mistakes. Does Clarin’s files have Purmamarca pictures labeled as Tilcara? No journalist of the travel section has been able yet to detect this error, one that has been made for the third time? Will there be an errata note in the next travel section of Clarin? We’ll see.

Update: the picture above is the picture that appeared on page 2 of the printed version of Clarin’s Travel section, last sunday, may 28th, 2006. The section’s website only shows the note, not the picture.

Some months ago, I published one entry (this one) about the touristic exploitation of the Che Guevara figure in Alta Gracia, Cordoba, a city he lived in for a good part of his life. Now, I’ve found out, through Diario de Cuyo, that the Che figure is still motivating new touristic projects.

Citing:

Alta Gracia’s Tourism Office (in Cordoba) has started a project to capture the growing number of visitors that are arriving to our country to visit locations linked to the emblematic figure of the Che, without overlooking the interest of local tourists in knowing his story.

The name of this touristic promotion will be “Che Guevara’s tracks in Argentina”, and the events that will be held by the Nation’s Tourism Office will be complemented in the cordobese city of Alta Gracia with visits to the former house (currently, Museum) of the Che Guevara.

The project establishes the argentinean cities the Che has lived in or has been related to, such as Rosario (place of birth), Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Misiones and Alta Gracia, and the Tourism Office of the Nation has organised meetings in which officers of these institutions will participate.

Facing this, and to get more information, some minutes ago I sent a brief questionnary to Alta Gracia’s Touism Office in Cordoba (turismo@altagracia.gov.ar) with a series of questions in order to obtain more information to share with you. The questions are:

What is the project “Che Guevara’s tracks in Argentina” about? What official organisms and representatives of the private sector are participating?

The note I read talks about a project in which other cities where Che Guevara lived in are participating. How is this coordination? What kind of joint actions will the cities carry out?

In previous occasions many people from Alta Gracia shared their opinions about the topic (in the spanish version of the original article). If any of you believe there’s something else that should be asked, suggest it in the comments area, and I will send it in a second email to Alta Gracia’s Tourism Office. I find it a very interesting topic since, according to the note I found, this new project linked to Che Guevara is part of a national project that involves Rosario and Buenos Aires, which speaks of a dimension much farther from a local initiative.

As soon as I get more news, I’ll update this note in the blog.

It’s quite common to consider the Internet a threat in the editorial world. It’s almost as if the perception were “we had a great business model, but now there’s the Internet to disturb and ruin it all”. But to consider the Web as an enemy is a mistake. Rather, we have to turn the Internet into an ally when obtaining better information. For instance, by allowing us to have a simpler contact with our readers, in case of travel guides. What for? To update info, prices, locations, for example. Nowadays, to think about a model of contents creation completely made by paid specialists just doesn’t make sense anymore, since most of these functions can be carried out better if we are able to create a community around our product. The idea is not simply “to lower costs”, but to help the always meager budgets destined to create a travels product find better ways to present information. That is: not just dedicate to collect information. That doesn’t have any aggregate value. We cannot compete with the Internet there.

As I’ve said before, I believe travel guides still have great opportunities in this market, even when the presence of the Internet is, for some, a threat. Part of these opportunities are so thanks to a central point: guides are capable to formalize information and present it neatly; to do the same with the Internet, we’d have to spent a lot of time searching, and finally we’d end up with a bunch of printed sheets, not too confortable to carry around.

This trend to formalize more adequately information is something that distiguishes guides such as Lonely Planet, for example. Recent editions are placing emphasis on the subject of tours. For instance, they make sections where they recommend what places to visit in a determined city, depending on how many days do we have available. This way, they help the tourist organise better his time, a scarce resource when we travel.

The other interesting thing is that guides should emphasize the trend the Internet is finishing to establish: it’s not only about having a didactic speech, from “specialist to student”; rather, there should be a relation among equals. That is, from traveller to traveller. The important thing is not to teach the other what he should see, but to provide him the tools he needs to live his own travel experience. Because that’s travel: an experience.

If you’re about to travel, or would like to start your blog with your next trip, take a look at some of the websites that let you keep a travel blog for free. Let’s check them out:

TravelPod: one of the oldest communities. Not only can we publish texts, but we can also add pictures; create maps with the routes we’ve followed, be it in a classic map or in Google Maps; readers can choose to receive texts and updates through email, and our friends can leave us comments, although they’ll have to subscribe to the site first. Each site has its guestbook. It has RSS. Very adequate for users who are looking for basic functions, although the interface could probably use a little update by now.

TravelPost: it has all of the mandatory tools: a personal journal, photo album, maps, etc. It’s possible to establish all of the cities and countries we’ve visited, to associate texts with them, and to observe what other users have written about these places, create itineraries, among other things. As we add more cities and countries, it’ll show what proportion of the world we’ve visited. Recently, they added functions to make reviews about destinations and hotels, a point in which they will compete with RealTravel (below).

RealTravel: the best design of all. It has some basic functions, such as travel map, a travellers posts qualifications system, photo publishing, blogroll creation and the possibility to make comments -only for registered users, though, a quite annoying limitation. Besides, there’s the possibility to make reviews about hotels and restaurants, and directly add them to the blog. By the way, the map we create in this site can be used at another blog outside RealTravel, since they provide us the script to paste it directly on our template.

TravelBlog: pretty basic, in visual and surfing terms. It’s built to emphasize the fact of quickly finding blogs about certain destinations. It has an image gallery and we can receive blogs updates through email.

Bootsnall: it also has basic functions, and it’s created to quickly find destinations. It has RSS feed, and can classify texts through tags. Visually, it’s not too attractive.

Travelblogs: another site with quite basic functions, and a not too elaborate visual aspect.They use a third party service for comments and email: Haloscan and Yahoo! Groups.

Travellers Point: it keeps the most traditional aspect of a blog, in this case, with a look closer to the old Movable Type templates. You can create categories for the entries, change the visual aspect, etc. It’s quite easey to use, with little emphasis to the community thing.

As part of what I’ve been reading lately about low cost airlines, I decided to make a list of the companies that are operating in Latin America. The list is probably incomplete, but these are all the airlines I found in the Internet. If anyone knows of any other company, let me know in the comments area. As you can see, most of them are located in Brazil and Mexico, the two countries that obviously are more developed in this area. Nevertheless, some countries such as Peru, Guatemala and Equator are already developing their own low cost airlines, even when the cost of their tickets are way higher than at other markets, such as the european. Here’s the list:

AirTrip (Brasil): www.airtrip.com.br
A volar (México): www.avolar.com.mx
Azteca (México): http://aazteca.com.mx
BRA (Brasil): www.voebra.com.br
Click Mexicana (México): www.clickmx.com
Gol (Brasil): www.voegol.com.br
OceanAir (Brasil): www.oceanair.com.br
Pantanal (Brasil): www.voepantanal.com.br
Tikal (Guatemala): www.tikaljets.com
VIP (Ecuador): www.vipec.com (not functioning yet)
Volaris (México): www.volaris.com.mx
Wayra (Perú): www.wayra.com.pe