Lonely Planet, easily my favorite travel  guidebook series, has embraced the web from the start.  The Australian company has moderated  a lively community of independent travelers at the ThornTree for many years.   

Now they are taking a bold step into the video era with Lonely Planet TV, which combines professional travel documentaries with user-generated tales from the road.   It’s a smart move for LP, which has already developed a base of video content through the Lonely Planet Six Degrees documentary series, originally developed for broadcasters including the Discovery Channel and Current TV.

The site has a professional look that is presumably meant to appeal to advertisers and to compete with long-standing travel journal sites like IGoYouGo, Real Travel, and Virtual Tourist.  Today there were ads running for the Australia Tourism Board.  But it still retains some of the backpacker vibe with channels like "Oh F^^^!, Oh Wow!" – the best and worst of travel.

The site is currently in Beta mode, but ThreeMinds got the tip-off from Tamir Levin, an Organic alumnus who left the US to take his dream job running IT for Lonely Planet in Melbourne.  Best of luck from all of us.

Misha Cornes