Jul
31
2005
wanderlust
My latest Web site obsession is the travel site 43places.com. It’s a fairly genius framework for people to track the various places around the world they’ve been, create a to-do list of places they want to visit, ask questions and share travel experiences.
What I love most about it is how open it is in allowing users to post their own content, submit supplemental information and even create new locations in the system. Have a great photo of this place? Share it. Know that restaurant’s address? Post it. Have an absolutely horrible time at this museum? Let others know about it.
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve gotten carried away checking off places I’ve been and places I want to visit, posting comments and photos and adding new destinations to the mix. And after all this work, I feel an intense sense of personal ownership, like I’m a pseudo-caretaker, keeping my part of the world nice and tidy. I think this sense of ownership is something that I think the folks behind the site try to cultivate, such as through its mechanism to submit ideas and bug reports and the friendly “thanks for helping us improve 43places” messages when users add new information. Everything seems very open and transparent.
The site’s only been live for a few weeks now, but the user community seems very active so far. I think it has the potential to grow into a fantastic community for travellers to share their experiences, research destinations and meet new people.
On a related note, I’m intrigued by typo, the Ruby-based engine that Robot Co-op is using to power its weblog. It seems lightweight but fairly robust at the same time. The AJAX “live search” feature is awesome.
![[Photo]](http://photos.morethanthis.net/images/2008-09-13/thumbs/IMG_0272.jpg)
Comments
Hella!
Saw you on 43places. Am glad you’re enjoying it.. I do like it too. Just wanted to post an ‘i was ‘ere’
Hey Aly. not to pretend to be all important here, but I used to work with almost all of the robot co-op guys and helped interview the one I didn’t (great guys, all of them)… and I’ll forward this along if they haven’t noticed it already.
Oooh, I feel important, though, and that’s what matters. By the way, feeling important is a lot like feeling drunk, but not too drunk. You important people know what I mean. Why isn’t there an HTML tag for, like, a knowing wink? Because I want to put a knowing wink here. A knowing wink with, say, a jaunty hat.