A friend of mine, Tim Winter, sent me a link to his new website about travel, tourism and heritage in Cambodia, with an emphasis on Angkor Wat <http://www.postconflictheritage.com>. The website is essentially intended to support and expand upon his recent book on the same topic, which can be found on the website. The site also includes links to recent news stories related to tourism and heritage issues in Cambodia.

While a lot of Web 2.0 tends to focus on practical tools for organizing trips and finding the best deals from insiders. At best, they provide users with information on must see attractions.

However, tourists are part of the tourism economy -- which is generally considered the largest part of the global service economy, and has huge impacts on host destinations. Few tourists fully understand their role in this tourism economy, and how they are shaping and changing the destinations that they visit.

Website like this one on Cambodia help to bridge this gap between being a leisure tourist and an aware traveler. Good job, Tim!

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.

"We promote responsible travel which emphasizes the importance of personal exchanges, deeper cultural understanding, genuine benefit to local people and their communities, preservation of the environment, and ultimately a more peaceful and equitable world."

Step Up Travel claims to be the first application of Web 2.0 to Responsible Travel, and I think they may be right. There are older websites devoted to responsible travel, including both resources on responsible travel issues and listings of responsible tour products. Two that I am familiar with are Planeta.com and the Big Volcano Ecotourism Centre. But both of these are in need of a major Web 2.0 face lift. And there is the National Geographic Center for Sustainable Destinations, which is sometimes related to the more commercial National Geographic Traveler. As colorful and engaging as National Geographic is, however, it lacks a social interface and comes across as more institutional and less in touch with the "real" people in a destination.

So I think, yes, Step Up Travel is the first responsible travel site on the Web 2.0 era:

• It has an attractive and clean interface,
• it provides resources to help make travel more responsible,
• it appears to be making a concerted effort to market truly local products that support the destination, and
• it has a Travel Network for "Socially-minded Travelers to Connect with local people, Get off the beaten path, and Change the face of travel."

The Travel Network will be the real test of the success of Step Up Travel in achieving its goals of linking local people with concerned and responsible tourists. I have joined and it is successful.