What would this picture sound like?

Hint: This picture was taken on Lake Nagin, Srinigar. That’s in Kashmir, India. Tomorrow I’ll post one of the many sounds that I recorded from the veranda of my houseboat when I was there.

I got lots of great stuff .. I am thinking that Lake Nagin will be moy first audio slideshow ..

Travelling Online

I just got finished doing a consultation and report from a travel organization wanting to beef up their website and add some more dynamic content.

It was a lot of fun travelling vicariously through the internet. I won’t be travelling again until the fall .. these sites provided me a good excuse to dream about where I want to go next as I looked at the wonderful pictures, browsed places where I want to stay .. much fun ..

Overall, the site-specific places where I want to travel are the ones which have lively, fun content .. not just listings about places to stay and things to do a la your standard tourist guidebook you get for free in government travel offices. These can be useful too, but a lot of them are written in a way that they are purely informational.

The best sites for me are the ones who present material in such a way that they encourage me to see myself in the picture. The more evocative the words, the more brilliant the pictures, the more likely I am going to imagine going there. And of course I’ll have to go to my dream places to fulfill the fantasy.

The Bay of Fundy blog does this very well. It’s received several awards and I can see why. It has personality profiles, it has recipes, it has dynamic writing and pictures .. as I read and look at the pictures on screen, I can see myself on the top deck of the Princess of Acadia across the Bay heading to Digby. And it’s done on the on-site blog site Blogger, so it likely didn’t cost them much other than good writers and content providers.

Philadelphia travel site – This site will keep me coming back because it provides so many useful tools for me to use. This is a great example of a Mashup — contains a trip planner from Travelocity on the front page. Weather update from Accuweather.com. Contains a personal itinerary builder to enable me to plan and save trip details without leaving the site. With my own trip details stored in my own account onsite, I will return to the site every time I want to make a change. Encourages repeat business.

Many more ideas that I’ll return to later .. in the meantime, I wonder if there are some great interactive sites about Guatemala .. my next travel destination.