Three For Thursday - April 1

Well today it's the Happy Birthday Chris Brogan edition. Everyone be sure to wish him a happy birthday on Twitter -- he's @ChrisBrogan if you're not following him.

We'll start off with a cool little tool that David Spinks shared this last Friday on Twitter. Fotobabble let's you make photos a lot more fun by adding a voice over to the photo. What a cool way to really alter the way you experience something as common as a photo. I've got a little vacation coming up mid-April that my family isn't coming along on so I'm looking forward to using this to document my trip. So very cool. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes. Can't wait to see how it works? Just click the image below for a demo.

 

Sticking with the photography theme... how about Customized Travel Planning for the budding photographer? Enter PhotoTours (found via Springwise). From the site:

Photours combines the art of travel and photography. We offer educational photographic tours that capture your imagination. Founded by 2 professional photographers tired of tours that took them to wonderful places only to find that most of our time was taken up with hurried visits to “the sites”, itineraries so packed that no time was left to truly appreciate the local culture and least of all be creative. We decided to combine our years of experience as educators, teaching photography workshops, as well as leading educational travel groups to provide what the market lacked…the type of trip that we ourselves would like to take!

With travel being such a crowded category, what a cool way to differentiate. But go farther. Think about this kind of thinking applied at the destination level. What if cities like New Orleans packaged jazz trips, cajun cooking trips or maybe dive bar trips? The packaging is easy, costs little and in a city like New Orleans, the possibilities are almost endless. Your town or country could do the same. Or maybe you'll create the "dive bars of the US" tour company. The consumer just picks a city and you do the rest. I could even see established brands like the FoodNetwork doing this with shows like Dinners, Drive-ins and Dives. For folks like me that are into that kind of food, we could follow Guy's footsteps and eat our way across a state, region or country.

 
And lastly, as location based is THE word in social media today I found this interesting...

Ladies and gents, I give you Checkin Mania. 

It's an über stalking tool that lets you monitor check-ins on Foursquare, Gowalla and looks to be adding Brightkite and Yelp soon. 

I tested it for New Orleans and the Gowalla integration seems snappy but the Foursquare data seems to lag and in some cases not populate at all. The interface is simple enough... drag the little person icon to the area you want to view, zoom in and presto, you see all the marked locations. Click on a location in the side bar and the check-in information for that location pops up. If you want to see the other platforms you simply click on their tabs and the list of locations changes to correspond to that platform.

Currently the usage pretty much stops there but I'm guessing Checkin Mania and a few other smart peeps are already brainstorming marketing leverage to bring to this platform. 

That's it for this week peeps. Thoughts? Ideas? Cool stuff that you've found and might want to share? I can hear you now so speak up.