I'm excited to announce that SoundAbout Philly a project I developed with the GMTMC (Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation) soft-launched this morning. Over a year and a half ago I began working with the GPTMC and the Pew Trust on creating a site that would enable people to download walking tours of Philadelphia with the idea of turning the city into a living museum. The project which started as an idea that I shared with a friend of a friend at the Pew (who had been thinking about similar things) and then in turn with the GPTMC has turned out much the way I envisioned it.
- The tours are free
- Segments are individual units
- They are tied to a Google map mash-up
- They can be customized and tailored by interest and time
- They can be shared with others
- It is scalable and they continue to have new tours added over the next year
The project was for me a way to get right many of the things that went wrong with CityReads, the audio tour company I started several years ago, and it means a lot to me that it is now in the world. It has been a long process that began two summer ago, got going last Fall when the Pew gave the GPTMC a grant for the project, with a buildout this summer. The GPTMC put together a super team of local resources and used the developer of their larger site to make it happen. They have a wonderful organization which has organized to put their marketing and promotional resources behind it which is pretty thrilling. During this long process, there were some personnel and technical changes (at one point I was actually going to build the thing) but I stayed with it, and it has been a real pleasure to help make it happen, overall I'm very very pleased with the site.
