As many of you know, the planned Webtogs / Social Hiking meet on Jurassic Coast has unfortunately had to be cancelled. As I know a few of you had already kept the weekend free and were looking forward to it, I have decided instead to arrange an informal Social Hiking meet for the same weekend.
Sharing The Wales Coast Path
This summer Steve Webb (@DragonWalk2012 on Twitter) will be tackling the 870 mile Wales Coast Path, from Chepstow in the south to Chester in the north, and he will be sharing his whole trip live on Social Hiking. In this post Steve explains how he got the idea for the trip and how he will be sharing his adventure.
Continue reading →
Supported added for JustGiving
Social Hiking was originally created for a charity walk, so I am pleased to announce that formal support for JustGiving has been added to help charity adventurers raise more money whilst sharing their trip.
Setting up Social Hiking for the TGO Challenge
Several users have asked me for a guide to help them setup Social Hiking for use on TGO Challenge – this post covers how to register, setup your location sources, link media accounts and create your map ready for your challenge. Although specifically for TGO Challengers, other users may find some of the sections useful.
“Mobile Apps, The Outdoors and Social Media” at Innov-Ex 2012
Earlier this week I was at the Innovations for Extremes conference held at Lancaster University. The conference was fantastic – the talks were interesting and thought provoking, and it was a great opportunity to meet and chat with a range of people from the outdoor industry. I will do a more in depth blog post over the next few days, but I thought I would do this quick post to share the slides from my talk – “mobile apps, the outdoors and social media”. It was a great pleasure to be asked to do a talk, and I hope it was interesting and useful to those who attended (or who were watching the live web stream).
Linked Media – flexibility vs ease of use
Right from the very beginning of Social Hiking, the site was designed to be as flexible as possible in how media accounts are linked. The site was originally built for a charity walk involving two hikers – and I wanted both of our Twitter and Twitpic accounts to be linked to the same map.
Social Hiking treats each media account linked to the site as a separate entity – your twitter feed is separate to your twitter photos for example. This has two clear advantages:
Firstly it gives you massive flexibility – you can link multiple accounts of the same type, so for example you can link your twitter account (with your hashtag) and the twitter account of your friends or partner who you regularly walk with (with their hashtags), you can include your twitpic photos without including the related tweet (by not including your hashtag in the description), or you could include some twitter photos without also including the tweet (by using different hashtags).
The second advantage is that each media type is nicely classified – Twitter photos are treated in the same way as other photo accounts (for example Flickr, Picasa etc), whereas the same tweet, added via your linked Twitter account, is treated in a different way (as a tweet, with the potential to have threaded conversations displayed).
The disadvantage is that it is more complicated – for Twitter in particular, you need to add a linked account separately for tweets, your mentions, twitter photos and twitpics. This is also probably not what a user would expect – surely if you link a Twitter account, you should also get the mentions and photos without more steps?!
Having flexibility is important and classifying media has some great uses that you will see in future updates, however I have just rolled out a modification that should make the process of linking accounts related to Twitter much easier.
From now on, when you add a new Twitter account to link (or edit an existing one), you will have the option to also create linked accounts for related media like threaded conversations (if the Twitter account is your own), Twitter photos, Twitpic and Twitgoo – simply select the accounts you want to add and the site will automatically create the necessary accounts.
Social Hiking – the next step… (and how you can help)
For those of you who may not know, Social Hiking started life as a personal project – I was walking Offa’s Dyke (a 177 mile path weaving between the English and Welsh border) to raise money for MS Society back in April 2010 and I wanted a way of sharing the experience with others. Thanks to a rapid deployment of an API from ViewRanger, the first ever proof of concept of Social Hiking was on 20th February 2010. Using it on Offa’s Dyke was a fantastic success, and thanks to the enthusiasm of the very early adopters, I was encouraged to take what I had created and open it up for others to use.
Social Hiking is all about you: our users and supporters – I cannot tell you how amazed I have been by your enthusiasm and support, the initiative ways you are using the site (pushing the boundaries of what it can do), and how you are creating a community around it. You are all awesome!
Until now, the features on the site have grown organically based on some amazing suggestions and feedback (like the peak bagging feature, combi maps, better media support, improved map loading speeds and showing planned routes on live tracks) and selfishly for my own use (like @advbot). This organic growth has meant that some features are still a bit rough around the edges and there is still no user guide – so apologies for the learning curve required to get to grips with the site and some of the features (and thank you to everyone who has been providing adhoc support).
Over the last few months I have been watching how you have been using the site, reading your suggestions and mulling over the future direction for Social Hiking and putting together a short and long term development road map for changes and new features. This plan will not be published, but it includes features suggested by users and a few of my own including some innovative features I know you are going to love!
The aims of Social Hiking remains the same:
- To help you share your adventure, big or small, with your online world and beyond
- To make it as easy for you as possible to share out in the field
- To respect your media content
- To support the software and services you already use
- To help foster an online community
- To help inspire people to head outdoors on their own adventures
Social Hiking is a project I work on in my free time. Other than a case of beer 
and some generous donations from users for a charity walk last year, there is no funding supporting the site. Costs are still relatively low (it costs around £50-£75 per month to keep the site running) but the biggest limiting factor is time – juggling paid-work, my own outdoor adventures and a home life means there is precious little time available for updates and support. As such the road map does include several means for future revenue to allow me to commit more time to it – however I want to reassure you though that I am completely committed to ensuring that the vast majority of features (both existing and new) are available to individuals free of charge and that any revenue source is not at odds with the aims of Social Hiking.
How you can help
Your enthusiasm is awesome – seeing you spreading the word about Social Hiking, offering to help out other users, and interacting with each other both on Social Hiking and beyond is really rewarding and helps motivate me to drive the site forward.
Although the road map for the future will be dynamic and will change as time progresses, it would be really helpful to hear your ideas and suggestions. If you visit our Customer Services Community you can flick through some of the ideas other users have had. If you like one please vote for it – the more votes something has the more likely it is to be included into the plan and implemented. Please also add your own ideas and suggestions – no matter how crazy, obvious or ‘out of the box’ you think they might be!
Finally I am also starting to put together a much needed help wiki to explain the features of Social Hiking, how they work and how to make the most of them. I would really appreciate the help of some volunteers to help me with the writing process (and in translation).
You can get in touch on Twitter, Facebook or by email.
Thank you everyone for your support and for sharing your adventures!
I would especially like to take the opportunity to thank: Karen, Sam, Phil, Tim, Chris, Jilly, Richard, Tookie, Gareth, Mike, Dave, Andrew, Martin, Dean, Karen, Colin, Andy, Basti, Jens and Steven for their ongoing support of and passion for Social Hiking (really sorry if there is anyone I have missed!)
Phil
Founder of Social Hiking
Introducing @advbot – Helping you Share Your Adventure
One thing that has always bothered me when out ‘Social Hiking’ is that most of my tweets lack context when published to the world. Whilst anyone viewing your map can see the location of your tweet in the context of your overall route (whether that is a short walk, a multi day hike or an epic global adventure), your tweet seems isolated amongst the general noise of a Twitter stream.
A chat with Jilly Sherlock on the adventure so far and what’s next!
On Saturday 9th April 2011 at 11.12am Jilly Sherlock set off from Felixstowe on a heavily laden bike ‘heading East’ – on 9th November, 7 months to the day since leaving, she arrived in China having cycled a whopping 9955km with at least 60000m of altitude gain – with every kilometre shared on Social Hiking. Whilst taking a break before the next leg of her journey, I caught up with Jilly for a quick email chat about the adventure so far and what her plans were for the next leg.
Video integration live and post-event with Bambuser
Before today, video integration was limited to Qik – now essentially a limited and premium app. Judging by the discussion on our Google+ page, video integration seems to be something quite a few users are interested in.
After a suggestion from Hendrik at Hiking in Finland, keen Social Hiker Pilgrim Chris took on the baton and got in touch with Bambuser, a nifty video app, about possible integration. The team there were really helpful and interested in what Social Hiking does.
Thanks to their easy to use API, I am please to announce that Bambuser integration is now live!!
Like the Qik integration, your Bambuser videos can be viewed in-page by visitors whilst looking at your map – we have added a check for live streaming videos and added an appropriate message to notify visitors that your video is live right now (so they can interact with you direct through Bambuser’s website).
Social Hiking will keep an eye on the status of your last 25 videos, and will automatically update the video status (live or not) and the title (so you can update your title later). There is currently no ‘garbage’ collection (removing deleted or videos set to private after being published) – for now Bambuser displays a suitable notification and this feature will be added at a later date with the media management tools on their way.
The most exciting feature of Bambuser however is that, like Audioboo, Picasa and Flickr, the date used for videos is the date the video was created (not the date uploaded) – this means that you can record your video and upload it later when you are back in signal (or have stopped for the night) and Social Hiking will still link the video to the correct location.
Bambuser videos can also be directly geo-located, and in the future an option will be available to use this information to create a beacon on your map (ideal for those users who do not use ViewRanger, Instamapper or SPOT).
For information on how to sign up and download Bambuser, please have a look at: http://bambuser.com/. To link your Bambuser account to Social Hiking, click ‘Linked Accounts’ and choose Bambuser from the list!
A big thanks to Hendrik, Chris and the team at Bambuser for making this happen so fast!
N.B. The integration has been tested for GMT – it should work for BST and other time zones, but this has not been tested. If you encounter any linking issues, just let me know and I will investigate!
Martin Free: Looking forward to it :-)...
daylightgambler: Sorry you can't make it. Sure we will arrange another one some time....
Barney: Great idea ! love to meet u guys trouble is im working that weekend !!...
PilgrimChris: Monsal Head gets my vote mate....
Andy Bryant: Great idea!...