Slack, slack, slack.

No, not my “forthcoming projects” folder. That one’s bursting-full, thankfully. More my unforgiveably irregular postings and updates here. It’s about time, so here’s a snapshot of some of what I’ve been up to work-wise in the last couple of months.

• My regular slot in the Sunday Telegraph‘s travel Q&A column, as consumer technlogy expert, continued with two advice pieces on data roaming. There are more coming out soon, on different subjects.
• A couple of UK guidebooks I worked on last year have been published. For Frommer’s England & the Best of Wales 2012, I wrote chapters on “Hampshire & Dorset” and “North Wales”, and co-wrote chapters on “Wiltshire & Somerset” and “London”. For Frommer’s London 2012, I was lead author and wrote 3 new chapters. There are more guidebooks in the pipeline, some already listed on my Amazon author page.
• I’ve been back in Tuscany (twice), researching a piece for the Guardian (coming soon) and two new guidebooks due out in 2012, one of them a new edition of my Frommer’s Florence & Tuscany Day by Day.
• Various travel features have appeared here and there, including this slideshow guide to Britain for music lovers.

If you represent or know of anywhere (or anything) I should see or hear about, I’m always happy to be contacted by phone or email, or on Twitter. I’ll attempt to update this page a bit more regularly in future… but my record on that to date would suggest I’m wise not to make any promises. See you around.

I spent part of March and most of April on the road, in Tuscany, researching an update to a major guidebook (about which more soon), but while I was away one or two things have appeared on- and offline.

Most satisfying of the lot was the publication of the new edition of our award-winning family travel guidebook (with a slightly revised name), Frommer’s Tuscany, Umbria & Florence With Your Family. I’m always happy to hear opinions on what’s right, or what’s wrong, about the book, so if you’ve read it or (better still) test-driven it in the wild, do leave a comment below or get in touch. If you’re a journalist or blogger and fancy reviewing it, drop me a line and I’ll arrange that. It’s not yet published in the US, so you can get a jump on the rest if you fancy seeing it now.

Three features appeared online in the last month. The first was a contribution to the Guardian’s 10 of the Best Summer Holidays for Under-Fives, in which I went with the island of Elba (out of season), and these friendly family apartments in particular. As part of my regular tech-expert Q&A slot for the Sunday Telegraph, I answered the reader question: Where can I search online for affordable alternative accommodation? Among my suggestions for sidestepping the usual villa, apartment, and hotel websites were the excellent “pop-up B&B” site Crashpadder.com and MonasteryStays.com, which sells what you think it sells, currently in Italy only (but watch this space). MonasteryStays.com recently hosted me with the Suore di Santa Elisabetta, in Florence, a friendly place I’d certainly recommend to anyone travelling on a budget and bringing a car into the city.

Most recently, I wrote an extended slideshow piece for Frommers.com on San Frediano, Florence’s rapidly-changing left-bank neighbourhood:

Cities change. It’s what they do. However, one of the draws of Florence has been that its center is stuck in time. It was old when Lucy and George traded gazes in E. M. Forster’s 1908 novel, Room with a View. It was old when the English Grand Tourists of the 1700s came to study the palazzo architecture and church art. Heck, some of it was even old when Michelangelo raised his giantDavid outside the Palazzo Vecchio. He’d still be able to navigate much of Florence’s centro storico, without Google Maps.

However, one part that is changing — and fast — is San Frediano.

There’s more in the pipeline, including three more guidebooks due out before the end of 2011 and hopefully an update to my Florence iPhone app (iTunes link). My Amazon Author Page has details of a couple of the books.

There’s a short interview with me in this week’s annual Bookseller travel supplement. It’s part of an interesting piece about how the move to digital has “changed things” for travel publishers, and what (if anything) this means for print. Quite rightly, I think, the conclusion is: The printed guidebook ain’t dead yet, and indeed is still seeing some clever innovation.

I won’t lift directly from the piece, as it’s not online, so pasted below are transcripts of the answers I gave to the interview questions. My meanderings were (quite rightly) truncated for the final feature; even I had to trim some of the waffle, in retrospect, to reproduce these below. So…

Are travel writers being given different briefs, and has the type of content that publishers want changed?

Yes and no. Certainly, we’re now clear from the minute we put keystroke to page that the content we’re producing has to work in a variety of formats. Given the wide range of the Frommer’s offering, for example, that might include appearing in an app, as lead destination information on Frommers.com, or as an e-book… as well as its traditional home in the pages of a guidebook. However, the basic demand for well-crafted, timely, accurate, and informative content hasn’t changed one bit. In fact, given the poor signal-to-noise ratio of travel information on the Web, those traditional qualities demanded by a leading guide publisher are even more important. Writers and publishers who want to make a profitable living in the era of mass “free” content have to be 100% committed to quality in order to survive. Sometimes, that means a 2-hour round-trip to check the accuracy of a couple of sentences of text.

Is the commissioning process changing? Is there less work available?

The commissioning process is changing in the sense that it’s now possible to bypass it altogether. There’s more work than ever before for entrepreneurial writers, and some out there are doing a fine job of producing quality content from outside the traditional publishing industry. I write for Frommer’s, in the traditional, contracted way, and have written and commissioned iPhone travel apps for InstantCities.com in a looser way, taking a share of the profits. Both work for me. Far more than the details of the commissioning process, however, it’s the role of the editor that’s key. The editorial process is what makes the quality difference, and I’m always grateful to the people that edit my work at Frommer’s, the Sunday Telegraph, and elsewhere. The carefully crafted edit, as much as the research and writing, is one of the key factors making content worth paying for.

What are the key changes as a result of the digital shift?

The explosion of digital is probably the biggest revolution in publishing since Gutenberg. It’s an exciting time to be a travel writer, for sure. However, the proliferation of “publishers” hasn’t eroded the value in writing for a leading outlet, a name that comes with its own reputation. It’s no longer the only way to get your writing heard, of course, but it’s still the best. The exponential growth of the “travel Web” has also tweaked the nature of our job. We’re as much “curators of the best things” as “discoverers of new things” these days. Digital offers one set of tools for curating information, certainly, but print isn’t standing still either, and print design is becoming hugely important for leading readers around guidebooks. Some of the forthcoming redesigns I’ve seen from Frommer’s for 2011 are mighty impressive.

[Disc.: I mention Frommer's and the Sunday Telegraph, obviously, because I write for them. Other publishers, newspapers, and travel websites are available.]

With my head firmly buried in four separate major guidebook projects (including a completely revamped edition of Tuscany & Umbria With Your Family due out in April), as well as commissioning some great new additions to the Instant Cities series of iPhone apps, this Autumn has been a little light on the journalism front. In addition to a feature on essential technologies to take travelling, for Singapore Airlines’ inflight magazine SilverKris (not online), I wrote about Finding the best late holiday deals for the UK’s Sunday Telegraph. The piece covered private sales and auctions, smartphone and iPad apps, deals newsletters, luxury hotel discounters, Twitter, Facebook, cashback sites, forums and voucher websites. Anyway, read it all at telegraph.co.uk.

More coming soon…

Can we rely on travel information we find on the Internet? An exchange on Twitter with entrepreneur and world travelling phenomenon Gary Arndt set me thinking.

@hackneye (me): Being right more of the time is what guidebooks do better than the Web. It therefore makes me sad to see one with horrendous errors.
@EverywhereTrip (Gary): I’d disagree that they get things right more than the web. They are always 1-4 years out of date given the publication cycle.

@hackneye: Yes, they can be, and sometimes that’s important. But they also tend to be researched and fact-checked more carefully.
@EverywhereTrip: So long as the public can edit the info, errors can be corrected quickly online. 1,000′s of people checking instead of 1.

@hackneye: I agree. But the public don’t correct most of the travel content on the Web. Hence the variable quality.
@EverywhereTrip: What is an example of this? Most pages have comments, or at least a way to contact the owner.

@hackneye: An example of what? An uncorrected error on a travel site? Just Google your hometown and dig around.
@EverywhereTrip: That’s the thing. I don’t see much incorrect information. People always give theoretical examples, never concrete ones.

@hackneye: Chelsea’s football ground is the site of a battle that took place 200 miles away: http://bit.ly/agSoZN… Michelangelo’s David is in the Uffizi: http://bit.ly/aq8Vfn [it isn't]. 2 quick searches, 2 highly ranked sites.

@EverywhereTrip: So leave a comment correcting the information problem solved.
@hackneye: I admire your idealism. It’s a fine quality. But I suspect ‘correcting the Internet’ is too big a job.

@EverywhereTrip: The internet is a work in progress. If you see an error, correct it. Everyone does a little bit and it adds up…

And so it continued, with a 140-character limit becoming increasingly unsatisfactory for expressing quite complex ideas. [Read more →]

One of the (many) things I find genuinely useful about Twitter is the ability to get an instant answer or opinion on just about anything. Like this:

Wondering: in the medium term, which is worth more to a tourism business: 1. Nice mention in a guidebook. 2. Nice mention in a paper. Ideas? [@hackneye]

I  didn’t really have a motive for asking this, other than genuine, theoretical curiosity. It strikes me that many PR companies put a lot of effort into courting periodical, weekly and daily media, and a whole lot less time on guidebook writers. Maybe PRs know something that isn’t immediately apparent to me. [Read more →]

Imagine how much better your guidebook would be if it knew exactly where you were as you read it, what time of day it was and your interests. Welcome to the world of the app.

An “app” (short for application) is basically a program designed to perform a task. You use them already: your word-processor is an app, so is your internet browser. Now the smartphone – mobile phones that do a whole lot more than make calls – has put the app into your pocket.

For travellers the app is big news.

Read the rest at Telegraph.co.uk.

It was announced this week that my second guidebook, co-written with Stephen Keeling, has been judged Best Guidebook 2008 at the ENIT Travel Writing Awards. Obviously, we’re chuffed to bits to have impressed the panel of Italian tourism experts, and to have beaten so many other fantastic new guidebooks. The new goal is for my next book, due out next year, to win the 2009 prize.

There’s more on the announcement here:

The winning Frommer’s title written by authors Donald Strachan and Stephen Keeling was singled out for the quality of its research, writing and opening up a new area in Italian tourism.

It’s a commonplace on this site that one should “defend” the BBC from unceasing, unsubtle and rather tiresome attacks from trenchant right-wingers. Very little written about the organization by either the Daily Mail, or any of its apers on the Web, has any merit. That’s true. The Beeb is worth defending: there’s something enriching about our ad-free broadcaster. Something that serves the public, that stands above the commercial white noise of modern television. Of course, the organization isn’t entirely non-commercial: BBC Worldwide makes decent profits that, at least nominally, feed back into UK public service broadcasting. So far, so uncontroversial. However, BBC Worldwide’s 2007 acquisition of travel guidebook publisher Lonely Planet did raise objections, [Read more →]