LP Less Than Three

by Erik Olsen on

Aspiring filmmakers out there pay attention. Lonely Planet, the guidebook colossus, is offering a big time travel opportunity to folks who send in the best travel film that lasts, and here’s the gimmick, less than three minutes. That may seem like a short duration, unless you actually spent time watching some folks’ homemade travel video, (which believe me, I have), in which case you know that some folks are just not meant to be filmmakers (what is so hard about holding a camera steady?).

It seems like a pretty good deal. If you check out the FAQ, you can read that LP is offering a first prize of 10,000 Australian dollars (which comes out to, what? about $780? JK!) to help pay for your own Round-The-World economy flight, an STA travel voucher and the choice of either hanging with LPTV folks in Melbourne (LP’s home base) or taking the rest of the cash and heading out on your own “dream journey”. Hmmm….hanging with the LPTV folks would be fun, buuuuuttttt….so the hitch is you actually have to produce the film, make it under three minutes and, here’s the catch, make it interesting enough that people will actually WANT to watch it.

Travel Video Contest

by Neil Woodburn on

We recently posted about one of the cooler new sites I’ve seen in a long time: Current Traveler.

The site combines YouTube with travel by hosting and producing a growing number of videos from travelers all across the world.

And now it’s your turn. In a bid to increase the number of videos they feature online, Current Traveler is having a rather nifty contest. Simply produce a cool clip, submit it, and if yours is one of the very best, you could win $600, a $1000 gift certificate, or a top-of-the-line Sony HD Camera.

Better hurry up, though. The deadline is October 17.

Friday Funny: Simpsons Episodes

by Erik Olsen on

As always, we try here at gadling very hard to make sure that our Friday Funny is somehow travel-related. Sometimes we fail. today, I offer you a virtual bonanza of lunchtime, sit-in-front-of-your-computer viewing. And for Simpson’s fans, well, this is about as deliriously wonderful as things get.

This link here takes you to a magical page where virtually very Simpsons episode ever made can be viewed for free on your computer. Don’t ask me how they did it, and don’t expect it to be up forever. I can already hear the footfalls of Fox lawyers galloping to shut this site down. But for now, this comedic cartoon cornucopia is all yours.

And so that I don’t backtrack on my promise to make this FF travel-related….I offer you links to two of the best Simpsons episodes ever made, both of which take the Simpsons away from the cozy confines of Springfield:

The City of New York vs Homer Simpson from Season 9
Bart vs Australia from Season 6

Slum Tourism

by Erik Olsen on

Having produced one of their very first travel pieces, I was very pleasantly surprised to see the recent deal between Current TV and Yahoo. Good for them. I have to confess that I rarely watch Current on channel 102 here in NYC, since so many of the pieces are agonizingly hard to watch, especially if you’re like me and don’t really like hip-hop all that much. That said, there are many gems among the hours of programming they feature, and I’ve always hoped they’d do a deal with someone like Yahoo or Google so you could select and watch specific pieces that get rated or passed around on the Web. So here’s kudos to Current and hopes that they keep on gong strong.

And here’s to Current as well for doing a great little story on Slum Tourism. When I was in Bombay, India two years ago, I made a special trip as a journalist to the Dharavi slums on the outskirts of town. This was a soul-slapping experience. The rancid sprawl of this slum, Asia’s largest ,went on forever and ever, as if it was a rank, wrecked city all to itself. And amazingly, while I was there interviewing one of the city’s administrators about the state of the slum, I ran into several tourists, walking around and shooting photos of people who lived in the slum. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but what I saw was exactly what they talk about here: slum tourism.

Is this an awful sign of the growing divisions of wealth in the world or an unsurprising reflection of human nature … that is, there have always been forms of slum tourism around, where the rich leave the comfy confines of their lives to “see how the other half lives.” I tend to believe the latter, but I could be wrong.

Travelistic

by Erik Olsen on

With the explosion in online video, it’s a bit of a surprise that we’ve seen so few companies dedicated to travel vids. There’s Travel Channel which for the most part repurposes stuff that they’ve put on TV. There’s Turnhere, which is a fine site, but also hit or miss when it comes to quality. Also, their films…a generous term…focus on specific cities and destinations. Other than these two, not a lot of serious players have emerged.

Until now? (yes, that’s a question)

It looks like the former CEO of MTVi (MTV‘s former dot-com division), a gentleman by the name of Nicholas Butterworth (of the syrup dynasty?), says he is in “stealth mode” (meaning it’s not ready yet) to develop a new online travel channel called Travelistic that he describes as “YouTube meets the Travel Channel meets YouTube”.

Whether that sounds exciting depends, I suppose, upon how much you enjoy watching people’s lousy home movies or the Travel Channel, and whether you believe that a mix of these two things creates “synergy”, to use a little industry vernacular. Personally, I sometimes find the Travel Channel unwatchable, and YouTube’s offerings work for me about .056 percent of the time. But the online video thing is changing damn awful fast, and someone is going to score big in this arena, so we’ll keep an eye on this one.