Something we like to keep a tap on here at Rev2 are sites for avid travelers and enthusiasts. TripTracker, which claims to be a “social travel mapping service designed to help you organize and store memories of your travels” is one that I found out about from none other than a friend who happens to be one of the most avid travelers that I know of.
In the real world, travelers use maps, journals and photos as their main means of capturing their experience. Appropriately, after signing up with TripTracker, a user can create a trip, upload GPS track files, add photos, and record thoughts, events and happenings in the journal while they are making the trip. And of course, additional photos can be added at any time using their desktop uploader (or iPhoto plugin.) Here is an example trip I created.
But TripTracker is much more than that. Rather than being a site oriented just around the personal travelling experience, there are quite a few distictive features that make it worthwhile. Trips can be embedded, viewed in Google Earth, subsribed to through an RSS feed, be voted upon (Digg-style) and are also commentable by anyone who visits the page.
Additionally, the Trips section of the site adds a whole community vibe and is a great place to stumble upon travelers and their trips. Users can click on any part of the world and discover members of TripTracker that have planned trips, and use it to get a general overview of the TripTracker community.
In my recent trip to America, I spent a lot of time finding the appropriate site or service to help me capture my experiences, and it’s a shame TripTracker didn’t exist back then. I had to use Yahoo! Travel instead, which while I great service, lacks of the true capability of things that I could’ve done — which TripTracker includes (embedding and Google Maps tracking being a couple of examples).
