Interactive holiday

Posted February 22, 2008 at 7:54 pm by Quintijn Knepper in General.

Everybody knows telephony and television made the world a smaller place, and with the arrival of internet this development accelerated.

It is quite common practice these days to keep the home front informed of your whereabouts during vacation. But with many young people having a Facebook profile or their own website, there is a significant shift to faster and especially more holiday-oriented sites.

I am currently busy planning a long awaited holiday. The trip will start in Las Vegas with a privately bought American car and will end two weeks and 3700 miles later in Miami. Since we at Jitscale are daily occupied with internet (technology), we want to combine this with our holiday.

To channel all preparations we use Backpackit. Really convenient for planning routes, and also for making checklists, entering flight numbers and times, and organizing hotel reservations. This application is created by 37signals, whose Highrise and Basecamp we use professionally. Backpack is just as user-friendly and the set-up is quite ergonomic and logical.

The digital heart of our holiday will be www.lasvegas2miami.com. Here we will combine as many techniques as we can. We will use a GPS tracker linked to Google Maps. This means we can be traced real time, with 5 to 10 min intervals.

Along the way, through our Flickr account, we will add captioned photographs to our site. Top Gear-ish videos we plan to shoot, will be posted online on our site, but will also be thrown into the world through YouTube.

As on average we will drive about 500 km a day with interesting stops (places as Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Roswell, New Orleans and Miami), a daily account of events will be made. And to keep frequent visitors posted during the day, we will use Twitter for sharing brief updates.

A fun and convenient way to report back on a boyish dream. Ideal for the home front to stay informed of our travels and to keep an eye on us. And for everybody interested in the U.S. a great way to admire the twelve crossed states through various interactive media.