The Trail Log

Backpacker.com recently rolled out a new website with a bunch of Web 2.0 goodness including a mini Flash UI and integration with the ever-awesome Google Maps Terrain feature. The site also added some community aspects so that you can submit trip reports, gear reviews, video/photo uploading, and rating features. They’ve also added a bunch of social bookmarking links so you can share with all of your social networking friends (though it doesn’t work on individual trips sadly - I think it’s a bug). All in all it’s a pretty good revamp and it’s made Backpacker a heckuva lot more useful to me.

I have a couple of nitpicks about the site however. One is that with all this Ajaxy goodness they didn’t take the time to make photo uploading easy. Instead of letting me upload any photo and doing some basic cropping and resizing I have to stick within the guidelines. Also, when using the trip finder, it’s hard to find things by activity. For instance, if I’m looking for a backpacking trip instead of a hiking trip I’d like to be able to see that before I click on it. You can sort of tell with mileage but it’s not perfect.

But in general it’s a great site and a great way to find interesting places to go. Once you drill down on a trip you can download the waypoints, see the trip plotted on a map, comment, and rate the trip. Another great feature of the enhanced Google Maps that they use is you can get the Topo data as well as the Terrain data. I think Backpacker.com will have an easier time of building a community than, say, Outdoorzy, just because of the built in readership.

But no APIs show we’re still in the infancy of Web 2.0 in the outdoors. But the new Backpacker is a good start.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS