As a geographer, I have a bias toward mapping applications that relate to Web 2.0 and Travel 2.0. So even though I get a lot of links to Travel 2.0 websites in my inbox, and even though I really should be reading student term papers right now, I did mention this new site (still in beta), in part because of its simplicity and mostly because of it potential usefulness for travelers in the US.

HappyMappy.com is a map of tourist attractions in the US. (Sorry, rest of the world.) Attractions include: "history, arts, recreation, nature, science, parks, sports, theater, concerts, nightlife & activities." It is basically a mash-up of Google Maps and Yahoo! Local, with some added information and functionality. At each zoom level HappyMappy will show up to 100 of the most popular attractions. It is unclear just how popularity is determined.

Checking the attractions around Flagstaff, Arizona, I found the results to be quite comprehensive, and there were a couple of items listed that I was personally not aware of. It was not perfect, however, as it included a couple of motels (not really tourist attractions) and places on the Northern Arizona University campus that I thought were a bit questionable. For example, the Du Bois Center is tagged with: Concert Entertainment Live Entertainment Live Music Music Nightlife Venue. However, it is mostly a food outlet for students and a conference center with meeting rooms and an auditorium that may, on a very infrequent occasion, have some evening event that is open to the public. In addition, as student recreation center is listed that is not open to the public.

In addition, downtown Flagstaff, especially on Route 66 (US Highway 89/180), has a lot of tourist arts/gifts/souvenir shops, but only a couple are listed. And I wonder how well they will be able to keep this information current given the relatively high business turnover in this sector. Finally, urban districts and scenic landscapes are attractions, as well. But these do not show up on the HappyMappy maps. While it might be possible to identify downtown Flagstaff as a tourism hot spot, based on the large number of pin points there, the historic hotels along Route 66 as not so well identifiable.

Also, I was not able to save my points of interest and maps either in Firefox 3 (beta) or on IE 7 after I registered on the site. I would think this kind of problem would be mostly resolved in a beta release, but I guess not this time.

HappyMappy reminds me of VeniVidiWiki.eu - which is a pin map showing links to tourist attractions around the world, but which also emphasizes videos and photos more, and text descriptions of the attractions less than does HappyMappy. VeniVidiWiki also allows users to add additional sites to their database, though there is no social networking related to that. And there is also Simpatigo.com which links the attractions to an itinerary route -- though that makes it more complicated, as well. I covered VeniVidiWiki.eu before here and Simpatigo.com before here.

VeniVidiWiki: travel guide

VeniVidiWiki.eu is a Google map wiki mashup for attractions around the world. Anyone can add a POI (point of interest) to the map and provide as much as possible of the following information:

• Name of place/poi
• Category - those shown above are listed as POI with Video -- so they all have a video link; the full list of categories is listed on the left
  
• Description
• Website, and
• Photo and/or Video links

The wiki has a large number of sites, and crashed a few times when I was trying to view a lot of them. But in general it is quick and easy to navigate, and worth exploring to learn more about attractions in a place you may want to visit.

Rrove "Share Your Special Spots"

Rove is a point or pin map creation tool that mashes up with Google or Yahoo Map. The example above is one person's list and map of the top attractions in Rome. Many of the maps are tourism and travel related (as maps tend to be, in general), including the Best of New York, and World's Best Beaches. Other maps show the location of members of a group (such as VlogInternacional ). Two nice features are (1) Detailed information that can be included on each item posted on the map, including descriptive tags, and (2) A short bit of HTML code that can be easily copied into any web page that you may have.

In fact, I created my own Rrove map for my Responsible Travel Network at Ning.com (see image below). It was easy to insert the code and tweak the width and height to fit the Ning.com size restrictions. Now members (and anyone else who visits ResponsibleTravel.ning.com) will be able to post their locations and their favorite responsible travel destinations. (You can also keep your map closed so that only you can post to it.)



Rove also promotes itself as a website for discovering places in the world, based on the maps that users have created. There is a search function, but I found it woefully lacking in its ability to find place that I searched for -- even though I had seen them on existing maps. In addition, there does not seem to be a way to search for a map (which they call "sets"). There were only 97 maps/sets on the day that I created my own map (above). But even then, it was a hassle trying to re-find the maps that I mentioned above.

In sum, Rrove.com is a great tool for creating and embedding user maps on your own web pages. I recommend it.

I got an email today from some place called Trippermap.com. At first I thought it was spam and almost deleted it. But instead I opened it a took a look. -- and I am glad I did. Trippermap.com used to be called Flickrmap.com, and I do recall signing up for their service a while ago -- a little before Flickr.com added its own geotagging function. However, at that time I did not really feel like going through and adding geotags to my many Flickr pro account photos -- which now numbers almost 22,000 (most of which are "public").

Well, apparently the Trippermap folks have been updating their tools and I think the current version is great! What they sent me in the mail was a link to my Trippermap, which automatically locates any photo that I have tagged with a city and country. Not all my photos have that, but many do -- and I think it would be quite easy to add those tags to sets of photos in Flickr. I copied the code from the Tippermap site and plugged into my homepage (near the bottom) and now I have a nice size map tagged with icons for many of my public photos , along with a photo bar and java-based viewing function. I have tried a few other Flickr photo bars, but never really liked the results. This is the first one that I will probably keep on my website!

In addition to the basic city and country tag approach to locating photos, Trippermap also provides a Google Earth tool that allows you to use satellite images/maps to locate one or more photos more precisely, and then add the latitude and longitude coordinates direct to your Flickr site photo for searching and viewing using Flickr's map link. A video Tutorial is provided on the Trippermap.com on how to do this.

The free version of Trippermap only comes with a blank outline map of the world, on which photo icons appear, and only shows 200 Flickr photos. Trippermap Premium costs $9.75 year and includes full color Google Maps, all your photos, and Trip Route/Itinerary creation by drawing lines from one photo icon to the next. (Each icon, by the way, can include an unlimited number of photos.) They convinced me to go for the Premium account.


NEW: After posting the blog above, I received an email about Panoramio.com you can geolocate your photos via drag and drop interface and using Google Maps and you can watch uploaded photos inside Google Earth with a KML file (http://www.panoramio.com/panoramio.kml)." - I visited the site, but you cannot really tell what it does without registering, which I was not ready to do (and there was no Bugmenot.com). However, there were some cool sample travel maps on their blog page, and you can also search without registering (type in the name of a place to get a map with geotagged photos).