2008-11-10

Podcasts killed the radio stars

The British Guild of Travel Writers has finally entered the 21st century, giving the "Ed Lacy Memorial Award for Best Radio Feature" to a podcast.

Tim Richards has been in a travel broadcaster/writer for thirty years, and picked up the gong last night for a guide to Istanbul, which was podcast on his heartbeatguides.com.

The site is an interesting model; some of the podcasts are free - others have to be paid for. There are more than 270 audio guides on the site, ranging from reports on British canals to ski guides.

Podcasts are currently the ugly duckling of social media; consumers are more than willing to share their holiday experience by writing a hotel review or by downloading photos or videos. Is there any reason why podcasting hasn't blipped the user generated content radar?

There was little else to report from the awards dinner - affectionately known as "the drivels" by travel media whose WTM starts with a black tie dinner on the Sunday evening before WTM.

Other than heartbeatguides.com, it was as if the internet didn't exist.

Surely 'photograph of the year' is a defunct category when there are 1.4 million photographs of hotels on Tripadvisor alone.

This post was originally posted by Kevin May @ Travolution Blog.
> Read the original post here