Wednesday, May 13, 2009

African Tourism on Google Maps

African Tourism Portal

The African Tourism Portal is an interactive African tourist guide which features rich media content including videos, photographs and tourism podcasts. The site currently covers countries in the southern half of the continent.

The African Tourism Portal allows the user to select categories of map marker to view for each country in the guide. It is possible to select categories of map marker from 'attractions', 'restaurants' and 'accommodation'. Within each of these categories it is then possible to select from a number of subcategories.

Clicking on any of the star shaped 'destination' map markers opens an information window which contains rich media content about that location. The rich media content includes podcast descriptions of the destination's attractions and/or tourist guide videos and photographs of the location from Flickr.

This video provides a good introduction to The African Tourism Portal:



Via: Programmable Web

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is great technology - I saw it at Indaba (Africa's Tourism Show). They can do amazing stuff. It is great for Afica that does not necessarily have the best maps.

Anonymous said...

Wow - this pretty cool stuff. Just spent a bit of time hovering around Cape Town and eventually ran out of time to look at all the information. Great that one can add and remove elements as these sorts of thinsg can become really clutered. Never seen this before (in this detail and searchability) - is it another African first??

Paul de Waal said...

Hi, I am Paul from SmartGuide and the developer of this interactive guide. Thanks for putting this post on your blog - appreciate the marketing.

To get an explanation of how it works see this You Tube clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXEiYla_rA0&feature=channel_page

PSixty9 said...

If you're a Tourist Destination in southern Africa and you are NOT on this interactive guide, you better hurry up and get it done!