When most people in the internet industry talk about cross platform we’re talking about websites that can be viewed and/or contributed to via mobile phone or PDA. But not those of us who work for "old" media companies who are, increasingly, creating applicaitons and services that re-use content created online in newspapers and magazines (the old handheld!) or putting it on-air.
Because I live and work in London and simply can’t bear to hear, yet again, about how the London bombings in July made "old media wake up to the value, power and immediacy of user generated content", I’ll leave that discussion for another entry.
Instead, I wanted to point out The Guardian’s excellent BeenThere. Essentially, it’s a website where anyone who has visited somewhere on holiday or wants to share tips about a city and it’s attractions for visitors can do so. But it’s more than that. The Guardian takes that content out of the internet and re-uses it in a two page spread in the Travel section of The Guardian’s Saturday print edition.
Lee LeFever (aka CommonCraft) has also recently set up a site, TheWorldIsNotFlat, where travellers can share their experiences with others. The site coincides with a round-the-world trip LeFever is planning to take with his wife. (Thanks FullCircle for the link!)
The other side of this is the growing number of personal blogs that bloggers use to keep in touch with their friends, relatives and the people they meet along their journeys. My friend Jody (and his partner Amy) just returned from an around-the-world-in-a-year journey and regularly blogged about their experiences, including being served Guinea Pig and surviving the Asian Tsunami completely unscathed, on their blog.
Hey thanks for the link Robin!
Mmmm, uh, yum yum? Nice tomatoes by that guinea pig.
Seriously, I am loving the travel blogs people are generating and they are becoming not only a form of keeping in touch and entertainment for the travel-addicted, but great reference sites. I use the Well (http://www.well.com) much the same way as it has a fabulous travel converence and of course, Cooking keeps me drooling at the keyboard. So not only do I have the recipe, I have the hacks, the pictures, the stories behind them which makes the process all the more enjoyable.
I wish there had been blogs when my Italian grammy was alive. I somehow suspect the narrative nature of blogs would have been a ton easier for her than trying to “translate” her cooking into a strict recipe. She was an intuitive cook, and watching her cook … well, I can imagine it captured in a blog post.