TripHub is a quite easy to use group travel organizer. The idea is to provide a series of tools to plan a travel among several people and to coordinate different details: time schedules, flight numbers, hotels, etc. Although the site is in english -obviously aiming at the american market mainly- it’s accesible to anyone who has a minimal knowledge of this language.

Besides the coordination tools, each group travel has an assigned blog to publish stories. What’s missing, at least in the current version, is a photo album or something similar. The contents upload interface is too basic, by the way. The information can be shared among the group members; for this, we can invite other people through emails.

As part of its business model, TripHub can allow us to search for flights and hotels; these transactions must be on commision. Besides, these pages have Google Adsense advertising.

While for now it’s pretty basic, TripHub fulfills its assignment. Surely it’ll have to add new functions if it wants to survive the competition of Yahoo! Trip Planner.

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.

Slowly, audio files that can be downloaded from the Internet -generically called podcasts- are making its way to the travels market. The english travel agency Thompson, for instance, offers podcasts for more than ten destinations, among them, Mexico and Egypt. A few weeks ago, we talked about the Lonely Planet Travelcasts. And the last three available are about Dublin, Bolivia and the South of Asia. About this topic, the travels editor Cath Urquhart has published an opinion column at Times Online, where she evaluates the possibilites of podcasts as an informative tool for our trips. Urquhart is interested in rebating all that story about the “death of travel guides” which would take place as soon as the use of audio files extended. I agree with her. We’ve heard this story before. For example, with the growth of the Internet, I’ve heard more than one say “why am I going to buy a guide for, if everything’s on the net?”. Unfortunately, that’s not true. The amount of information we can get on the Internet is huge, but completely disperse and unsystematized. Guides are, precisely, of great value not so much for the originality of the information, but for the fact that it’s clearly organised and structured. Of course, such organisation can be argued from many points of view, even political, but that’s another issue. But that the information is hierarchized is really important when you travel and have little time to search for info.

Now, well, what possibilities do podcasts have in the travels area? To begin with, I believe they can have excellent aplications in established tours, where they can function just like the audio guides delivered at some museums. In this way, they help to focus the traveller’s attention in some points. Another advantage: the tourist can take the audio file in his mp3 player and listen to it during air flights or long bus rides, and access to new information.

By the way, Jennie German-Molz also talks about this topic in her blog. And, in spanish, Viajes a tu aire has made several podcasts about destinations like Cuba and New York.

Few speeches have seen so generalized in the latest years as the one that sustains that the physical world is less important, as social and labor relations are delocalizing. The greater presence of the Internet has helped to create this impression, for which the entire world seems to leave behind its historic roots based on the possession of material spaces, to enter an era marked by the domain of the network and the symbolic.

Such appreciations are clearly exaggerated. While many proclaim the decadence of the physical world, there are a series of facts to be considered. I will point them out, in an isolated way. One, a part of the world clearly concentrates the biggest economic income. Two, in almost the whole world, the value of real estate are raising, and at least for two years now people talk about a “real state bubble”. Three, oil reserves are becoming so valuable that many opt to “physically” invade others to maintain its domain on them.

So, where are we then? Is the world becoming symbolic and virtual or is it still as anchored on the possession of material physical assets, as it has been for centuries? More likely, both things are taking place, simultaneously. The economy is increasingly having a bigger weight on the nets of value construction anchored in knowledge and the symbolic -there are the huge numbers of electronic transactions made everyday, or the value of innovation in business processes- but at the same time this “virtualization” is taking place within a process of notorious revaluation of certain “physical” properties, such as real estate, oil reserves, natural resources. And there’s nothing contradictory in it -although it provokes a long series of tensions, of course. Rather, we have a relation between both phenomena, in the same way in which, for example, communications media are fragmenting but at the same time are focusing into property.

The next years will be a sample of particular tendencies. A greater increase in the virtualization of certain social relations -particularly with the growth of teleworking, a phenomenon that presents advantages to the employers and also to the employees- and the growth of the value of scarce physical assets. Don’t be surprised: in a world where in theory everything is becoming “more virtual”, many of us will have as an almost impossible dream buying a house. As Lash and Urry would say, we’re heading towards a real economy of signs and spaces.

Those particular paradox of market economy: the poorest continent of the world, Africa, has been in the latest years the region of the world with the biggest growth in the number of mobile phones. It went from 7.5 millions of mobiles in 1999 to almost 80 millions, today; 1 of every 11 africans has a mobile phone. This represents a 58% annual growth, while Asia had a growth of 34% in the same period.

How can poverty and the demand for new services be combined? Facing the bad infrastructure of fix lines, many people opt to do what in technology studes is known as leap frog: to skip one state of technology installed and to use directly the newest one. In this case, not even install a fix telephone line and head straight to a mobile. It’s paradoxical: despite most of africans live on US$ 2 a day, many of them need to have access to mobile phones to be able to work. Add to this the explosion of economic mobile phones supply, with prepaid plans that allow to control the consumption by charging overpriced on air minutes. This is similar to what is going on in Latin America, by the way. Two interesting pointers. One: the fifth part of the continent’s cell phones are concentrated in South Africa. Two: in 2003, Nigeria’s telcos had to suspend the sale of chips and new devices to renovate the net, which was completely saturated.

The possesion of a mobile phone is a business opportunity in these types of countries. I can only cite one example that I’ve seen several times in Bolivia: people who have several cell phones tied around their waist, that allow people to make phone calls by paying a fix fee, one that’s cheaper for many destinations than the traditional fix network’s. While this is related to how expensive it is to talk on the phone in Bolivia, it’s interesting as an example of survival and finding new opportunities to make money with communications services.

The news can be seen in the Herald Internationl Tribune, and I originally saw it at New Mobilities, at el Cemore’s blog.

Bonus: some info about poverty in Africa

Number of refugees: 15 millions -3.3 millions had to leave their countries for some kind of conflict, and 12 millions had to move to other parts of their country as refugees.

Annual city growth: 3,5%

Percentage of population under 25 years old: 71%

Percentage of population that depends on agriculture to survive: 66%

Taken from Purse Lip Square Jaw.

“The new media are always forced to do, at first, the job of the old media”. This idea belongs to Marshall McLuhan, an author that hasn’t been quite well read from communicacion sciences (at least in my country, Argentina). In the beginning, radio was forced to make some sort of long distance theater. Movies were forced to make like theater, but without the actors -and that’s why in the first movies the camera doesn’t move and the actors are always in scene. And with television the role to be presented was the one of movies; thus, in its beginnings people gathered around the device and the consumption was not individual at all.

And something similar is happening with podcasting: as a format, it’s rather being used as a radio on the Internet. Working as a form of distribution of recorded programs. And what is wrong with that? That the great potential of the Net is not the distribution, but the capacity of collaboration among the users to develop contents. Until we count on tools that allow for podcasts to take advantage of this capacity of collaboration, podcasting will have many difficulties to start off as a massive tool of contents generator. A problem that, of course, has to be added to some others: the technical difficulty to generate good quality podcasts; the high demand of broadband -the in the future, probably won’t be such a problem, thanks to the appearing of free repositories such as Archive.org-; and the difficulty to index the contents of these programs -until we can search in them as we do today with text, a massive use as a reference when creating new contents will be hard.

For now, we still see podcasting a little as a trend, or a ground where many bloggers think they can extend without greater problems. Relevant podcasters will surely appear ahead, taking real advantage of this media. And not necessarily will they be popular bloggers. One thing is to write and another to be able to produce audio contents good enough to attract Internet users, anyways.

By the way, if someone is not quite familiar with the concept of podcasting, you can check its definition at the Wikipedia.

Every now and then we find out that the academic field produces some interesting tools for classification and organisation of information. A case that really interested me H20 Playlists, a site that allows us to organise, by using tags, academic papers, journalistic notes and alls kinds of texts to build our own selections from a thematic classification the we define ourselves. One of the most interesting functionalities is that it lets us search by word or keyword among lists generated by other users, and add them in a simple way to our own. Then we can publish it under a Creative Commons license and share it with the rest of the site’s visitors.

Since this tool is still in beta phase, it still lacks a few things, such as the possibility to edit massively certain lists. But it has some interesting points, like the possibility of separating by using subtitles the different fields within the list.

In my case, I’ve been developing a list of studies about Mobilities, a category that sums all sorts of physical and virtual mobility given in our society -and, hence, comprehends tourism, interaction on the Internet, for instance. Since I built my list starting from others already existing in the site, it’s still a little messy. But you can see it in this link. The RSS feed of the list is here. Each item on the list is a different thing in the feed, which is really something positive.

I got to H20 Playlists thanks to two notes published at CultureCat; more exactly at this and this entry.

Along these 20 months of writing a blog dedicated to travel and tourism, I’ve gotten used to regularly reading a series of sites and blogs dedicated to this topic, where it’s always possible to find interesting material. While some of them have already appeared on this blog, I thought it would be fair to reunite them in a list to make it more accesible to reach this information. Of course, if you wan to suggest other blogs or relevant sites that I might have ommited (or simply, don’t know of) you can leave a comment here.

I hope the list is useful to know a little more about this market and how it’s covered in the Internet.

Blogs in english

Buenos Aires, city of faded elegance: specifically dedicated to Buenos Aires, quite useful to recommend to travellers that can only read english.
El Sur: about travel in Latin America.
South America Travel: travel stories around Latin America.
The Cynical Traveller
The fully air-conditioned sound of speed: about travel writing.
Written Road Blog: another excellent blog about travel writing.
Travel Writers
Online Travel Review: about the travel business.
Rolling Grains: an excellent blog about inclusive tourism.
Where are we?: travel stories.

Blogs in spanish

Con la mochila al hombro: travel stories.
Artículos de Viaje: travel stories.
Consumer.es: news about the travel market and business.
De Gira: travel stories, specially focused on the asian southeast.
Mochileros.org Blog: travel diaries, specially focused on Latin America.
Jujuy.com: dedicated to the argentinean province of Jujuy, which borders Bolivia.
Namasté: one of the first travel blogs, currently outdated.
Ollavape: dedicated to tourism in Spain.
Sector Turismo: about relevant issues for professionals of the touristic sector.
Sin Equipaje: travel stories.

Sites in english

ABC News Travel
About Business Travel
Travel Photography Forum.

Anne Galloway comments on a note published by BBC News, which states that british people spend more in their mobile phones than in electricity and gas bills. It’s interesting how the famous “mobility” attract us, but at the same time creates a series of high expenses in relation to other items. Even more in latin american countries, where connection and hardware costs are higher in comparison to our income.

Or, as Anne says: “It is useful to remind ourselves, to say out loud, that many people cannot afford the privilege of mobility. Ubiquity is still concentrated in certain countries and use is mostly local. Anywhere, anytime does not extend to everyone; decentralisation is not the same as equal distributionâ€?.