About Us

In 1989, on a whim, I bought a ticket to Los Angeles. I also bought a travel guide - Lonely Planet of course - and it was money well spent. I fell in love with the place and the book.

Almost 20 years on, a lot's changed, but the travel guidebook is essentially the same. When Tony Wheeler started Lonely Planet in 1972, the guide book was a revolutionary concept. However there is no doubt in my mind that if he was starting out today, he wouldn't even consider publishing books and would be embracing the internet and emerging technologies with a passion.

The travel guidebook is dying as the medium for travel research and trip planning. Denying this is denying the truth.

Just as the iPod has revolutionized music, the web has revolutionized the way people access, store, and share information. The travel industry cannot escape this reality - the internet can do things bigger, better and faster than travel guidebooks. By the time a book is written, edited, printed and delivered it is out of date, not to mention the resources consumed in making a product with an inherently limited shelf life.

So why hasn't the web already rendered guidebooks completely obsolete?

Firstly, mobile technologies are still in their infancy, but in the near future handheld, portable digital devices will make the idea of carrying bulky guidebooks laughable.

Secondly, it seems to me that people have trouble finding quality information, for free, presented in a more interactive way. Many major sites are merely replicating the print model, producing static, uninspiring pages, while others are just lists of low quality ads and links. So when I started So Much World, I thought we could produce an exhaustive travel web resource which would be the online alternative to travel guidebooks. I spent time on the design and usability, I ensured writers were paid so I could demand high quality content and I even sought out the best ad partners to ensure that we only offered relevant services to our users.

While I am immensely proud of So Much World, in reality no single website will ever achieve such lofty ideals and goals.

The future is in bringing together the whole of online travel including small websites and blog owners who may not be "professional" travel writers, but who are extremely passionate and knowledgeable in a range of areas. I now realize that if each of these sites and blogs are chapters of one large online travel guide, we need a way to bring these chapters together to form a cohesive whole. This will be the moment when the travel guidebook is finally put out of its misery.

My experiences with So Much World have convinced me that the future is in bringing a conceptual shift to "publishing" travel guides. So Much World,

just like Youtube, has innovated by creating a technology that gives people a voice, and not by controlling the content itself. I started Travelbookmarking.com and TravelShout.com to harness emerging social technologies and make them relevant to travel publishing. Travelbookmarking embraces social bookmarking, where people can share, review and comment on their favorite travel sites. You can also save your bookmarks and snippets of information, allowing the user to create their own personalized travel guide for free.

TravelShout is a live chat application that can be installed on any site or blog, and by using it you can have a conversation in real time, across different sites. TravelShout allows people to share and access tips, ideas and information from amongst their peers, just like they would in real life, creating a big travel conversation online. Together, these sites offer a new paradigm for online publishing by promoting a democratic conversation across a travel network potentially spanning the entire internet.

In 2006 Rupert Murdoch - the King of Papers - bought Myspace for a price that shocked the world. Why? In discussing the emerging social technologies online he noted, "To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media – which, incidentally, is what really destroyed the old world of kings and aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it's the people who are taking control."

The people want video; they want to view things on their mobile phones; they want to upload and tag and comment and share; they want to print what they need and leave the rest; they want things to be personalized and relevant. People want more than guidebooks offer, and they want it for free. The guidebook is on the way out - but what isn't diminishing is public demand for world class travel writing and editing, beautiful photography, and well-researched, reliable information. The big publishers don't seem ready to accept it yet, and many travel writers have accused me of trying to harm their industry, but that couldn't be further from the truth. I'm just reflecting a change that has already happened.

The power has shifted away from those who turned travel into a commodity, back to the individual traveler and their story. Those websites and blogs who embrace quality and conversation, and who understand that travel represents basic human needs - to learn, to grow, to discover, to experience, and to share - are the future of travel online.

These sites are our contribution to the exciting new world of online travel and I hope you enjoy them.

Ed Lester

Christchurch, New Zealand