I’ve been remiss in not mentioning a big event in the life of a friend — namely, my fellow mesh conference organizer and former journalistic colleague Mark Evans. Now the director of community at Web 2.0 travel site PlanetEye, Mark and the rest of the team have relaunched the site with a new design and some new (or enhanced) features. I thought the original PlanetEye was pretty nifty, and the redesign — done by the gang at Happy Cog, who also do work for WordPress — makes it even easier to navigate and create the “Travel Packs” that are the core of the PlanetEye experience, which consist of photos, maps, reviews and other content related to your trip.
I also like the featured Travel Packs, which Mark and CEO Butch Langlois and others have put together, such as the “10 Places To See Before You’re 10” pack, and the fact that many destinations have comments and reviews from experienced local writers. The only quibble I have is that when you type a location in the search bar that the site doesn’t have a page for yet — such as Thailand — all you get are listings for Thai restaurants. It might help to have a landing page with a “write your own review of Thailand” pitch, or some aggregated content as a starting point. Those quibbles aside, however, the site looks and works great, and if I could afford to actually go anywhere, I would be more than happy to take advantage of it 🙂
For more reviews of PlanetEye’s relaunch, check out the posts by Mashable’s Kristen Nicole, Read/WriteWeb’s Frederic Lardinois and Mark Hendrickson from TechCrunch. Mark has his own take on it here, and CEO Langlois has some thoughts on it at the PlanetEye blog.