Take care of the Lonely Planet, Auntie Beeb
A friend sent me a link yesterday, noting the sale of the Lonely Planet company to the BBC. I don’t really have any impression of how the BBC has treated properties it acquires, so I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. 
The BBC says that the deal will “allow Lonely Planet users to access BBC content - such as Michael Palin’s New Europe.” Well, umm, okay - didn’t I have “access” to that before? In any event, my advice to the BBC is twofold - concentrate on improving LP’s online presence. The “Thorntree” - LP’s online forums - is one of the Internet’s great wasted opportunities. LP users are the type that love to share useful info, but the forums are so poorly designed that they are near unusable. The books, on the other hand, are perfect. Don’t touch the guidebooks. Not even a little.
Blacknell.net » Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? says:
[...] a big fan of the LP series, but I’m not surprised by this - too many people putting together too much [...]
April 14th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Blacknell.net » Building a Better Guidebook says:
[...] I’m a fan of the Lonely Planet, but I’m always looking for improvements on the usual guidebook model. This has me keeping an eye on the electronic efforts. Some have worked - I’m a long-term subscriber to Vindigo, which focuses on US cities (not exactly a guidebook replacement, but it’s pretty good). Still looking for something that would let me replace that 4lb Lonely Planet I dragged through India, however. I recently came across this comprehensive review of an effort to do just that by Lonely Planet and Nokia, where (some of) the LP content has been reformatted and made available through the Nokia Maps application. In the end, it’s more supplement than replacement, but it’s a good start. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. RSS 2.0 [...]
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:18 am