Travel Rants editor Darren Cronian has switched from once being a thorn in the side of the travel industry to launching his own hyperlocal content product for tourists.
MyLifeInLeeds – a side-project for Cronian to aggregate visitor information for his home town in Yorkshire -Â gets it official launch this week after almost a year in development.
The site brings in articles from local writers only based in Leeds and covers the city’s attractions, events and exhibitions, hotels, restaurants and bars.
Cronian is one of the most popular travel B2C bloggers in the UK but has carved a niche in the market by writing exclusively about the foibles of the industry rather than destination material.
He is also the organiser of annual TravelBlogCamp which takes place in London in November during World Travel Market.
Disclosure: Tnooz was exclusive media partner for TBC in November 2009.
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It’s a good initiative, but I really wonder how much time he will have to spend on re editing old and obsolete material on that blog…although once enthusiast about the initiative and on the verge of copying it for that city far enough east from your HQ that prevents me from doin it, but kudos nevertheless…and nothing to disclose:-)
Hi Guido, keeping the guides up-to-date is going to be a big challenge because content can become stale very quickly. As a local though we can pick up these changes a lot quicker than travel guides that aren’t locally written and guides that feature tons of destinations.
At the moment with 33 guides for Leeds, this is easier to manage, but as time goes on and more content is added it’ll be difficult. This is why I am working on the next stage of the site which will be to create a community so locals can also edit the guides (with moderation) and report out of date content.
We’ve already had to update a number of guides, i.e. Border’s bookshops closed down most of their UK branches so any guides affected were amended.
Thankfully WordPress is such a great CMS system that we can easily find keywords within every single guide to help us highlight the guides that need amending and flag them up.
@Darren
First next step is a nice Avatar for MLIL isn’t it? You know I love to nudge you from time to time.