More than a year ago, I published an entry dedicated to Flickr groups that had travel and tourism photos as a central topic. It’s been a while ago, specially in the fast paced Internet, and it’s time to update this list. If you have any suggestion about Flickr groups that are not listed here, leave them on the comments. Before I forget: soon there’ll be news about this blog’s Flickr group, as a way to build a travel photography group and be able to discuss them in spanish -besides, of course, to establish a new difussion channel for the travellers’ work.

Travel Photography: with more than 5 thousands participants, the travel photo group is close to the 100 thousands published pictures. To explore the group is a long hours task, but I guarantee you’ll find excellent pictures.

Lonely Planet Bluelist: a group of travel pictures that comes from the publication of Bluelist, edited by Lonely Planet, which selects the best travel experiences. It’s relatively new, but it already has more than 500 members and 1500 photos. Only one picture per day can be published.

Travel Portraits: pictures of people we’ve found in our trips. Almost a thousand photos, more than 120 members.

Public Transportation: about public transportation means in several places in the world. 170 members, over one thousand photos.

Globetrekkers: with more than 720 members, they’re close to 14 thousands pictures of many places in the world.

Road Trip America: road pictures of the USA.

Visit the world: another travel photo group, with almost 100 thousands images.

Travel Pix: another large group of travel photographs, with over 40 thousands images.

Travellers and Landmarks: general topic travel pictures.

South America: South America pictures. The group is mostly in english, but the fact that it has about 10 tohusands pictures about our region makes it very attractive.

Passport Stamps and Visas: this is one of my favorites. It simply is about pictures of stamps that embellish your passport. Frankly, in some cases the number of stamps is remarkable. OBviously, you’ll feel pretty envious when looking at those passports.

Trenes: in spanish, a group dedicated to trains, with over 40 members and 200 published pictures. Your contributions are welcome.

Trains and Trolleys: obviously, photos of trains and trolleys.

Aeroplane in flight: pictures taken on flight. I’m sure we all have one of this kind.

Route 66: The Mother Road, the most famous route in the USA.

City Sunsets: while this is not a group specifically dedicated to tourism, the idea to photograph sunsets in various cities can’t help to be attractive to a traveller. It’s quite popular: 522 members and almost 1400 photos.

Motels: potentially an interesting project, which has grown a lot in this last year, and has over 200 participants.

By the way, even when Flickr is actually a quite good publishing platform, it still lacks some important tools when building groups. For example, a tool to filter images by popularity, or the number of people that have marked it as a favorite. They’ve added some functions in the groups; such as the possibility to limit the number of pictures that a member can publish by day. But it’s time to add new ones, if Flickr doens’t want to be left behind.

It’s been said that since the appearing of collaborative technologies in the Internet, the so called “Web 2.0″ has made its may through. The potential of the Internet, according to this conceptualization, is not the ability to distribute contents in an economic way, but to provide users a collaborative platform of knowledge construction. Thus, the way of enjoying and obtaining muisc -with users building files exchange networks- is changing, as well as the way journalism is being made, from the irruption of the so called “citizen journalism”.

Is something similar going on within the travels area? Is the Internet modifying the way to do business in the tourism market? Can we talk about Travel 2.0?

Let’s take a look at some of the changes brought by the arrival of the Internet to the tourism field:

To be able to talk about “Travel 2.0″, that is to place a label on it, we’d have to find a collaborative dimension among the different actors. Except for the integration of the airlines supply chain -something that many companies from other sectors, from informatics to food related, have done- I don’t see many collaborative uses related to the travel field. There are some very specific examples, such as Wikitravel or sites destined to share information -which, we have to admit, is a limited form of collaboration. Is there some way in which the Internet can change the tourism business, in the same way it’s doing it with journalism or the delegation of tasks to third parties many companies are doing? As long as this doesn’t occur, we’ll hardly be able to talk about a 2.0 era in the travel market.

We’ve talked about travel poscasts before. Now, Reuters, the news agency, is writing about it and condenses in a single article the references of this growing trend, although for now it hasn’t resulted in a very dominant site. Surely, during the following months we’ll see more podcasts coming out for the tourism market, particularly now that mp3 players are getting cheaper. Of course, it’ll be a challenge to enter markets where broadband is still scarce; one thing is to make a technology podcast for geek users, and another to make one for a segment where technical knowledge is only the average user’s (via Gadling).

The travel experience does not begin when we set foot in the airplane or bus. It begins much before, when we have a vague idea of the places we’d like to know. That idea can later be shaped into travel preparations. Finding out costs, evaluating its impact on our income, getting the tickets, searching for information, packing. This slow process of preparations is as much part of the travel as the trip itself. And it usually is the most stressful period, since when we’re on the road things happen much faster -and we realize that most of the research was quite useless.

Now I’m at that process previous to movement, reading and searching for information about the south of Brazil -that is, from Rio de Janeiro to Porto Alegre. Tourism in this area is focused on the beaches, but in my case I need to move around. If I stay longer than two days in a beach I frankly start to get bored. So, my ideal is to visit several points along the 14 days I’ll be in Brazil.

Unfortunately, quality tourism information about Brazil doesn’t abound in Argentina. Since, apparentely, it’s been taken for granted that most argentineans go to Brazil to lie down on the beaches all day, it’s quite hard to find decent guides. Forget about buying the Lonely Planet. Maps are not easy to find either; although in this case a map edited by De Dios Editores is available and it’s interesting for the map itself only, since the information it provides is quite limited, and it’s targeted to the middle/high class. So if you’re in Argentina and want to check a guide in english, Amazon is the only way. Of course, it’s costly; to the value of the book, add US$7 for each volume and US$6 for total shipping charges. For example, The Lonely Planet Brazil, priced at US$17.81 ends up costing US$30.81. Which is something, in a country where the exchange rate is higher than in other Latin American countries.

Much of the research was made through the Internet. For this purpose, Writeboard is a very useful tool. My wife and I have been adding info -hotels, schedules, bus costs- in a collaborative way. For those of you unfamiliar with this site, the functioning is simple: we provide a private website, one that has a password; then, we add the addresses of the people that will participate in the contents; and later, they’ll get their passwords by email. And that’s it. Then, you just have to add text as in any other wiki. The good thing is that many people can add information to the same page without having to exchange emails the whole time -besides, this kind of information is hard to consolidate. As soon as I organise the contents, I will add the info in the WikiNomade (spanish only).

And for now, we’ll keep on with the research. At least, until the ends of january, when we leave Buenos Aires and its ferocious summer.

Everytime someone talks about Greasemonkey, there’s always the issue of security. But there’s also another difficulty, this time on the user’s side: every time you update GM, most of the scripts stop working -and this also happens when we update Firefox. The problem is, of course, that we’ve gotten used to using some of these scripts and now we’re forced to change certain processes. For example, in my case, I used the Bloglines and Del.Icio.Us integration tool developed by Persistent Info. I also found useful some scripts for Google, such as Butler which gave me direct access to other search engines. Something quite interesting -particularly in the search for images. At least from the plugins side, Firefox has solved the issue of updates. Isn’t it time that Greasemonkey scripts follow this path of automatic update? Although, I’m already listening to complaints that alert us about the huge insecurity that the automatization of uploads would bring.

You must’ve read this many times around: the key issue of blogs is its capability to allow text producers (bloggers) and their readers to collaborate to broaden and improve the contents and articles published. This is accomplished thanks to the integration of tools such as comments and trackbacks. In a way, this is true. But sometimes we can’t help to think: to what extent is this speech no more than a legitimation of blogs as tools, when they’re still growing and many times facing a very unreliable reading from the communications media.

But at Endocitosis de Red (spanish only) an interesting discussion about commercial blogs is taking place. The key: to make a blog good, we need attentive and collaborative readers, but to make the most money out of it, we better get visitors from Google or other search engines. Why? Because “parachutists” visitors are the ones who click on Adsense’s advertisement boxes. Regular visitors don’t pay attention to the ads and don’t click on them.

Rather than considering it an opposition, we should face this as a delicate relation. On one side, without readers who help us, with their collaboration, to improve our blogs, we won’t have better contents. But in the case of blogs with advertisement spaces, without a decent Google ranking and many “parachutist visitors”, the income will be low. Is it possible to encompass neatly this relation? Won’t the focus on the need of income end up ruining good part of the blogs’ collaborative possibilites?

Other possible conversations are arising. Aren’t blogs depending too much on Google? Will we get anything good from obsessing about our Pagerank? Will we write for our readers or to accomplish being found by a search engine? This kind of open discussions are an interesting opportunity to see how critical can the blogosphere be with itself, even at the expense of being, sometimes, too self-referencial.