I just got an email from this website called Schmap, wanting to use a couple of my photos I have on Flickr of the Simon Norton Museum for their online travel guide of LA (actually just wanting to have them in a pool of finalists for consideration). Kind of flattering since I'm about the shittiest photographer ever, so I submitted them.
But I was looking around this site and it's actually pretty cool. Seems very new, and the content is a little bit light right now but the interface is really nice and I think it will be great to get a first look at cities you're interested in.
I'm not sure if many people realize this, but a lot of online services these days provide ways for developers to use them on their own sites...Google Maps, Flickr, Yahoo Maps, etc all have ways for web developers to integrate content into their sites. There are a lot of cool sites people have made using these interfaces...one I've been using for a while is
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/ for mapping my running routes.
So Schmapp is using the public interfaces for these sites to create their guides. When you view a city it's divided into three sections...a map of the city on the left provided by Google Maps or Yahoo Maps, the main guide of things to see/do in the center, and on the right you get detailed information on whatever attraction you've clicked on. The detailed area also lets you scroll through photos that come from Flickr and if you click on the photo you get to the Flickr page for that photo (and from there you can browse that person's entire set if you are particularly interested in something).
It all works together nicely...mouse over a point on the map and it loads the attraction in the rest of the page. If you're scrolling through the list of places in the middle it highlights the location on the map. The only drawback is that they're kind of basing the whole concept on having maps available, and the mapping services typically only have them available for major cities and the most developed countries.
Here's LA's guide for example:
http://www.schmap.com/losangeles/home/
The other cool thing is that you can create your own Schmap style site using Schmaplets. For us most likely it would be a travel-diary kind of thing for a city you've been to...or you could review restaurants in your hometown or whatever. You can put your schmaplet onto a blog or website if you've got one.
http://www.schmapplets.com/
Anyway, I thought it was cool and it's so new I bet there will be a lot of improvements.
Schmap!
Linear Mode
