More recently we started to invite independent bloggers to post their articles within our city guides. Bloggers in Lima, Marrakech, Mexico City, Rome, Santiago and Singapore have already enlisted. If you write a blog about a city for which we don’t have a featured Local Expert, we want to know about it!

And for all of you moleskine die-hards or modern story-makers, we would love to get pointers to any bloggers who are sketching their cities. Encouraged by the sketches of artist Gabriel Campanario, we are hoping there are more people out there that make it a habit to bring their drawings to the online world after a prolific session with their notebooks. Hopefully you’ll remember to note the address of whatever you’re drawing, as we are all about location.

As we discover them, we’ll make an effort to link to them from our city guides and give travellers a new way to explore destinations.

We’ve also made it easy for any PlanetEye user to submit reviews attached to a location by virtue of blogging about it:

Within your profile, you will now see a check box labeled “Import my travel-related posts.” By entering a valid blog URL (it must have a valid RSS feed containing your content), checking this box, and then saving your profile - each time you write a post that links back to a PlanetEye city or place, an excerpt will appear and link back to your blog post.

For example, if you were to write a post about the Peninsula in Chicago, all you would need to do is include a link to http://www.planeteye.com/Place/The-Peninsula-Chicago+357902.aspx

This should be pretty useful if you have a blog but don’t write about your city all the time. Just make sure to include the proper PlanetEye link whenever you do have a post about a location and we’ll link to it.

It was a cold blustery January morning nearly 17 months ago when I first met Butch Langlois to talk about PlanetEye and his vision for it. From my perspective at least, there was an instant connection. We shared many things right off the bat, a passion for travel and technology, interest in sports and coaching our kids, previous backgrounds in hockey, a love for good food, Seinfeld and a common belief in a travel market opportunity and the way to take advantage of it. I was looking for a new opportunity in general; one that would only come with the right person at the helm. I, needed my “Skipper”. Not being one to speak for others, but in retrospect, I believe that Butch was looking for his “Gilligan” (I refuse to say little buddy). That first meeting took place at Marche in what is now Broofield place on January 28, 2008 and my first day with PlanetEye would come on February 25th, less then one month later!

The easy line would be that the rest is history. Not exactly in this case, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Over the next several months the company would experience incredible growth. Planeteye hit remarkable milestones, each time surprising both Butch and my expectations. The primary reasons for that success was the great people behind the scenes working hard to fulfill our demands and the original piece of technology from which our company was founded, continuing to perform at the level we needed it to. Not everything has turned out exactly as we had planned, but the company has experienced growth we can all be very proud of and we have maintained a clear focus on our strengths and goals.

Throughout this period of time, I have been able to tackle things I never imagined possible before, and have focused on areas I didn’t have exposure to in my previous roles either. Working with Butch has been a tremendous period of personal growth for me. So you can imagine my reaction when he told me that he was leaving. Upon reflection, the right reaction is to thank Butch for working tirelessly to get PlanetEye on the right track, believing in a vision and having the conviction to stand behind it. He has built a team that is unlike any other I have experienced before and this a real tribute to his hard work, dedication and character. He has been an excellent boss, role model, teacher and friend. I think all of us are indebted to him for that.

The one thing that I think and hope every PlanetEye employee would tell you about Butch and I is that we have been completely in step with the vision for the company. My plan is to stay on that course and continue to share with the world all that PlanetEye has to offer from both a content and technology perspective. At the same time the PlanetEye.com site will continue to evolve, becoming the dominant online presence we all believe it can be. In the coming weeks and months we will be able to share with you some things that we have been working very hard on and are extremely proud of. We hope to be able to share that first major “B2B” partnership with you very soon.

All of us wish Butch and his family every success in the future. We will all be cheering loudly from the sidelines. I remain as excited in what is ahead for PlanetEye as I was on that first day back in January of 2008. Our future is bright, our path clear and our team strong. I am excited to take the reins as President and CEO and am grateful for those who have believed enough in me to entrust the reins with me.

One day, I think we all hoped that things would work out for Gilligan, and that when given the chance to shine he would make the Skipper proud and get the castaways off that Island. I am not planning on letting Butch or the entire PlanetEye team down either!

Jonah

It’s with some sadness that I am announcing my departure from Planeteye. I will be heading back to Roger’s, where I left almost 9 years ago to the day. Corporately I will be joining the Rogers New Ventures (RNV) team who as an early stage technology development group invests, develops and operates next generation broadband wireline and wireless technology companies. I will focus on both the assessment of new ventures as well as management performance for the existing portfolio companies. Operationally I will be heading up the first RNV portfolio company Zoocasa, who is focused on the consumer real estate market. It’s been an exciting and eventful nine years and three start-ups since that surprising Globe and Mail front page coverage of my Roger’s departure back in June, 2001 (and yes I know the hair and glasses are awful, though the hair less grey for sure) but I can honestly say that I am incredibly jazzed to go back and continue to build on the early Zoocasa successes and help other entrepreneurs navigate the start-up waters.

Butch (left) and the buybuddy.com team

Leaving PlanetEye and the folks here after two years at the helm was an incredibly difficult decision to make but it was made easier knowing the company is in good health and will be in great hands for the trek ahead. Jonah Sigel who has worked side by side with me in the trenches will take over as CEO. The company is well financed having raised money earlier this year and is about to announce its first major b2b client, a recognized leader in the travel industry. I’ll leave that official announcement and fanfare for Jonah.

The consumer travel market is a dynamic and competitive one and having Tourist Boards, Airlines and Hotel operators ringing your phones off the hook to get their own PlanetEye type experience bodes well for PlanetEye’s future. I want to personally thank the small but amazing team who built the PlanetEye experience over the last two years and as the many awards attest (check out the sidebar on the right) they have much to be proud of.

I’ll be heading to the departure lounge end of the month.

Back in October I wrote a post endorsing Microformats as a way for bloggers to include location information within their posts. With this post we had hoped that other bloggers would follow our lead on how to structure a travel article to include the correct geographic data. A few did, but many others argued that the process to create the correct Microformat was cumbersome and distracted them from writing a good travel article.

And so we took on the challenge of finding better and easier ways to enable the same kind of advanced travel blogging tools we had been offering our writers to a much larger audience. As part of this project, we migrated every one of our travel bloggers to Wordpress and rebuilt the tools they were used to as a Wordpress Plugin that is capable of finding places of interest and writing down the proper microformat. At the same time, whenever such microformat is used and our Plugin is active, a Google Map identifying the correct place will be shown at the top of the post. What does it look like?

For the blogger, we’ve kept things very simple: enter the name (or address) of a place, and pick from a list of potential matches. All of this is powered by Google Maps, but we’ve kept our servers in the loop and whenever someone adds a place that we didn’t know about, it will automatically be added to our site. When the article is published, that particular microformat will look like a simple link to a PlanetEye page, but will have the proper location information encoded for the map to render.

All feedback from the first group of bloggers using the Plugin is fantastic and we hope to make it available to a larger group of bloggers soon. If you are interested in integrating this Plugin into your own Wordpress blog, please leave a comment and we’ll get in touch.

If you want to see the Plugin in action, here are a few blogs that are using it: The Sydney Traveler, The Amsterdam Guide, The Boston Guide, The Berlin Guide, The Barcelona Guide, The Edinburgh Guide

(use the zoom controls or click on any of the markers to get more details)

This exclusive group of hotels includes some of the most famous hotel properties, such as:

• Burj Al Arab in Dubai
• The Lodge at Kauri Cliffs in New Zealand
• The Regency Intercontinental in Bahrain
• One & Only Le Touessrok in Mauritius
• …and many more

Would you like to embed a map like this one into you blog? Read all about our Embedded Travel Packs.

Travel Pack Notes / Journal

The first thing we’ve added is the ability to record a journal, in the format of notes, along with each photo and place you have added to your Travel Packs. You can check out a live example of notes in action within my Entourage Travel Pack.

You can use notes for a lot of different things - for example, recording your confirmation code for your hotel, or reminding yourself why you wanted to visit a certain place before you take your trip.

Once you return, they are a great way to provide some context around what you did while you were there for family and friends. Of course, you can always write a general review, but great to take it one step further and go in to a bit more detail.

That’s exactly what each note is there to capture. You may be asking, “how can I take these notes with me on my trip?” Well, you can now print out an entire Travel Pack in a very simple and clean format.

Printing Travel Packs

One of the biggest requests we’ve received since we introduced Travel Packs was to have an easy way to print out their contents to take them with you on your trip. This is now easy to do by using the “Print Travel Pack” link.

You can see an example of a print view for one of my Travel Packs to get an idea of how it looks.

Setting Travel Pack Dates

One of the most important aspects of planning a trip is actually identifying the dates you are going to be there. This comes a bit later in the planning process, but there is now a pretty simple way to do that for each location within a Travel Pack.

We’ve always thought of Travel Packs as part-itinerary, but also part idea catcher. This is why dates aren’t required when setting up a Travel Pack, and they aren’t needed to organize each thing by the day - trips are meant to be free-flowing - many times you think you are going one place a certain day, but end-up somewhere completely different.

Blogging Tools

OK, a quick break from Travel Pack enhancements for a sec. One of the great things we’ve added is the ability for anyone with a blog to easily geotag their content and have their posts appear on PlanetEye as user reviews.

Within your profile, you will now see a check box labeled “Import my travel-related posts.” By entering a valid blog URL (it must have a valid RSS feed containing your content), checking this box, and then saving your profile - each time you write a post that links back to a PlanetEye city or place, an excerpt will appear and link back to your blog post.

For example, if you were to write a post about the Peninsula in Chicago, all you would need to do is either:

• Link there using the URL for the place on PlanetEye
• Embed a Google Map in your blog post that points to that place

You can see the post where I geotagged a restaurant in Toronto called Takesushi, where I had dinner tonight - and how it has been pulled in and shows up on the Takesushi Resturant page on PlanetEye.com as a user review.

We have some more in-depth documentation going live later on in the week that will step through additional details. Always feel free to e-mail me with any questions or comments you have.

Embedded Travel Packs

Now, probably one of the coolest things we’ve put together is the ability to embed complete Travel Packs in to blog posts, websites, and the like. Check out a live example of the Entourage Travel Pack I mentioned above.

Simply visit the page for the Travel Pack you want to embed, and click the “Embed Travel Pack” link.

You will be presented with a pop-up that contains some HTML code that you can copy and paste and put anywhere you like.

That’s it! We’ll be posting detailed documentation later this week to step through adding this to posts on popular blogging platforms, and more information.

As always, if you have any comments, questons or feedback feel free to contact me directly.

I’ve spent a good deal of time talking to PlanetEye users, and I will be reaching out to our community even more moving forward. If you would like to help us out by providing feedback on new features, as well as any of the things we could do to make your experience using PlanetEye that much easier, drop me a line.

Here are some of the highlights from the latest release.

Advertisements

First and foremost, you will now notice ads running throughout PlanetEye. We have a great partner in the Travel Ad Network who ensures the content presented is actually travel-related and will benefit PlanetEye users.

We will be slotting them in to a couple of different places as we go to get a feel for what works.

Personalized Matches

One of the areas we have been spending a great deal of time on improving is personalized matches. PlanetEye offers travelers a variety of ways to control the hotels, restaurants, attractions, and cities that are presented throughout the site. We have taken this one step further - in addition to the travel interests you have saved within your profile, the contents of your Travel Packs will now be taken in to account.

We have also improved some of the areas throughout the site that provide recommendations - namely on place and destination pages. Let us know what you think!

Updated Reviews and Ratings

Travelers can now rate cities along with places. In addition, we have tightened the relationship between the two - you now must provide a rating in order to write a review, but you can rate a place without writing any review at all.

We did this to make sure we capture the best possible traveler reviews possible, while still offering an easy way to provide an opinion on a specific location without writing anything.

Improved Sharing Methods

Previously, it was only possible to share places, cities, Travel Packs, and photos using e-mail. We have integrated AddThis to offer a much wider variety of ways to get PlanetEye content to your friends and family.

RSS Feeds

Every PlanetEye user, destination, and local expert now has an RSS feed.

These are quite useful for following along with the most recent activity for things that interest you. For example, from any city on PlanetEye the RSS would provide new traveler ratings and reviews, articles from our Local Experts, as well as any new photos, restaurants, hotels, and attractions added to the city. In addition, Travel Packs that feature the city will also appear in the RSS feed.

As an example, you can subscribe to the Toronto RSS feed.

Partner Pages

One of the things that confused most users in the past was, “what are those little icons that appear everywhere?” The best example would be on the search page (see an example search query for Chicago):

When you click on any of these icons now, you are taken to a page that documents all of the places on PlanetEye associated with that partner. For example, if you were to click on the Travelocity icon, that partner page would list all of the hotels on PlanetEye you can book through Travelocity. Clicking on the New York Times icon will show you all of the places (whether a hotel, restaurant, etc…) that have been reviewed by the New York Times.

This is a great release for us and there are many more to come in 2009!

while a lot of these services make our life on the Internet a lot easier, another group of services on the web helps to keep our offline life organized. Here is our list of the top ‘real world’ apps that have made our offline lives easier in 2008.

Here at PlanetEye we spend a lot of time dealing with the complexities of managing a very large collection of geocoded data points and then finding ways to make this information accessible in the most relevant contexts, being maps, travel guides and articles just so you, the user, can plan a great trip. So yes, we think “Real World Web App” describes quite well what we are all about.

While brief, ReadWriteWeb’s editorials are precise thanks to the time they take to explore the web applications they review and understand what makes them unique. Beyond the great photography, useful travel planning features and cool maps they understand that part of the power behind PlanetEye is the quality of the content generated by our Local Experts around the world. Not only they are great travel writers but generate content that is geocoded making it more relevant to users exploring worldwide destinations. Take a look at our Unique Christmas Gifts edition for a perfect example of what is possible.

Note: ReadWriteWeb has recently taken a strong position to defend good reviews in an open war to PR firms declared by TechCrunch.

Map Updates

The changes really start with the map, as we continue to build upon the efforts we set forth when we released v1.0 in September of this year. Our goal is to help travelers plan their trips more effectively - and we believe this can be accomplished by focusing on methods for planning visually. And for PlanetEye, that means our maps.

The screenshot below shows the map view for Boston, MA.

You will notice we’ve made the category colors easier to spot, and cleaned-up the “cards” that represent each place. The details that were there are now contained within each map pin. If you click on one, you will see what I mean.

Travel Pack Changes

We always want to make the travel planning process easier and more intuitive. Previously, Travel Packs were separated out in to both a list and a map view.

Those two pages have now been consolidated in to one featuring maps for each destination within the Travel Pack. In addition, a much easier navigation process - including a mini trip overview - is provided.

Also, you no longer have to edit the Travel Pack in order to add destinations to your trip plan - you can simply add them right from this page.

You can check out my Pasadena Travel Pack, from which this screenshot was taken for a live example.

Contacts

Ensuring your personalized matches deliver the best places for you is something we spend a lot of time working on. As we add more and more information to PlanetEye, we are continuously improving the ways in which that information is presented so you can build trips quickly without sacrificing the quality of a hotel or restaurant.

What better information to help find these locations than from other travelers? 

For example, you can add me. Because I used to live in Pasadena, CA I’ve written and rated a lot of restaurants around that area that I’ve been to - so if you are taking a trip to LA and have me as a contact, you will see which places I liked to frequent and why. This contributes to helping you make your travel decisions more easily.

Each rating and review (or Travel Pack) created by your contacts gets taken in to account along with all of your other other travel preferences to ensure the best places for you will appear near the top of each list. In the screenshot below you can see why the restaurant Casa Tua was recommended to me while browsing Miami Beach.

To edit your travel preferences, login to your PlanetEye account and go to your profile. Click on the “Set Travel Preferences” button under your profile picture and check off the things you prefer to see and use while planning a trip.

We are dedicated to creating a great travel planning product and always love to hear about how we can do better. You can reach me directly to tell me what you think we can do to improve.

To make it easier to tell people what PlanetEye does, we put together a short video that provides an overview on why PlanetEye is such an interesting and valuable travel planning destination. Note: The voice was done by yours truly, which gives me new-found appreciation for people who do it professionally!