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I also think 'linguacasting' would also be great. How-to's on speaking the local lingo.
All this stuff could be downloaded through a usb port in the back of a seat. ["Excuse me, could I have a power supply for my seat and card reader please?"]
Even if people fell asleep listening to the lessons, I'm sure people would argue that they'd still learn from them subconsciously.
;)
Might also try the AudioBook area.
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Also look at museum guides, there are more, kind of the same idea, professional and amatuer.
http://www.ricksteves.com/news/travelnews/0602/...
And yet still you will have to beat my dinky local library ('member those things?) which has around 5 Paris travel DVDs, and according to the library (cute but married) chiqlet on my IM, the travel DVD section gets a lotta use.
So podcast travels maybe for Geeks R US Travel Inc. but no one else...
Oh, Christopher, you keep ripping down my ideas. Maybe I should do one of them just cause it makes you mad. Heheh.
> Shanghai or Tokyo or San Francisco or Las Vegas or
> Moscow or London or Cape Town.
Amusingly, Virgin Atlantic has podcasts for a variety of cities, including Shanghai, Las Vegas, London, and Cape Town... but not one for Paris yet. :-)
http://virginatlantic.loudish.com/
Their model is also an interesting one-- If they get people interested in various cities via these podcasts, they build greater demand for their airline flights.
Note: I don't work for any Virgin companies, but I'm a raving fan of Virgin Atlantic and also created BransonBlog.com, just to disclose any biases.
BTW, far more than 500 tourists fly into Paris in a day, especially this time of year -- probably more than 100,000.
To take this a bit further - let's embed location data into podcasts, so that when you listen to them using location aware devices (i.e. PDAs/Smartphones with GPS), you can get the equivalent of the old cassette-based audio tours one could hire at museums.
So, your trip to Paris could include a commented tour of the Louvre, and an eating out guide that tells you what the best restaurants are within a five minute walk.
I think people who are starting fledgling content business in things like Second Life are discovering the long tail principle even if they cannot articulate it.
I found my palm guide to Hong Kong (that I bought) very ueful. I hope to find my PSP talkman talking phrase book equally useful. So it seems natural that the content by experts combined ina user created content, open source thinking way would be well worth pursuing.
We have PDA's for museum and zoo tours http://www.eternalegypt.org being an example. Now if I could help author that content as a user, how I viewed an exhibit and how people like me chose to view the exhibit it woudl save a lot of wasted time looking at things that are not of interest.
"So, as I head into the content business I’m thinking a lot. What’s valuable today? Owning a Google keyword."
I still have dibs on mashplication (check it out on google :-) )
I think this is close to what you are talking about. Lots of great content already exists up on that site. Short films produced by local filmmakers on the neighborhoods in which they live.
Google "holidays for single travellers" brings up 3.89 million results...maybe a market there :) I know this is wrong top-down thinking, but it's there.
I agree with you partly regarding family trips; there would be times when you could just say "hold on, darling, let me check the podcast to see where we can go eat". As for the particular case of tour guides, most museums have them, yes, some on cassette tape, others more sophisticated on CD (like the Louvre, now that we're at it) - but they are not convenient in that tapes force you to follow an itinerary, and you end up forwarding and rewinding all the time, with CDs you could have some form of track-to-section guide, but still is not as convenient as walking by something and your player automatically jumping to the right content.
Cheers,
Which is exactly the brainwave pattern of Scoble and most of Silicon Valley...which is why, when it comes down to the end, just alotta hot air talk, and no action.
Great post.
Funny, we just started a videoblog about travel!
scourist.com : daily travel video.
JON.
scourist.com
See I have this thing, I use up HD space quick. If I'd have a few TB, they would eventually fill up. I have a 40 gb Ipod and it's almost full, maybe a few gigs free. That doesn't mean that I don't have other music to upload, I always do.
But it's still doing better that 4 million other titles on Amazon. If you had self published the book instead of going through Wiley, you'd be earning the publisher's share rather than the author's share. As a celebrity (yes, you're a celebrity, I actually recognize your photograph from a session at WebmasterWorld) you have your own platform from which to sell books, it's doubtful Wiley has much of value to add to your marketing. It's true that the Long Tail is mainly valuable to middlemen, such as Amazon, Lightning Source and Google. But it's also true that you can making a living selling less books, music, etc, if you remove some of the unnecessary middlemen, like the publisher:-)
A distributor gets you distribution, a big publisher gets you sell-in. Tim O'Reilly has written quite a bit on his blog about the low commercial success rate of new books, even with sell-in. If your book is targetted at a very wide audience, has high visibility, and isn't in direct competition with books from publishers paying more for co-op placement, bookstore sell-in might result in a lot of sales. It might result in a lot of returns and remainders, which are death on Amazon.
Sell-in, however, has nothing to do with success on Amazon, unless you believe in the advertising effect of seeing books at stores and then returning to Amazon to buy at a discount. The decision you have to make as an author is, what percentage of your books are likely to sell through bookstore placement (over the lifetime of the book) as opposed to sales through Amazon and special order.
Since the point I was trying to make was about middlemen and the Long Tail, I'll go back to Lightning Source, who can get your books into Amazon at a short discount. While the exact math depends on the page count and size of the book, and works better with paperbacks than hard covers, it boils down (for me) to about a 7:1 relationship. If I can sell one book self publishing for every seven books that would have been sold by a trade, I'm breaking even, without ever giving anything up. Mileage will vary, but Amazon alone probably sells more than one in seven new copies in many genres.
I don't want to spam your blog with links, so if you're curious about the math, feel free to e-mail me. I did sell well over 100,000 books as a trade author before I went back to self publishing, and have received trade (and distribution) offers for every book I've self published since, so I'm not a publishing theorist:-)
Geogad's tours are made up of several MP3 files, and each file has a photo that highlights the audio narration. This photo could be a picture of the tour location so that the traveler can get his bearings, some detail that the traveler might miss if not pointed out, or a map accompanying the audio directions to the next tour stop.
Please stop by the Geogad website and let us know what you think.
Well, I'd like to know the best way to use my laptop to continue options trading?
Is there good, fast, internet connections around?
Don