When I was thinking about features for a new phone, GPS was one that strongly piqued my interest.  This is because when I explore the world, I like to be able to share recommendations of sights, places to stay, places to eat, etc. with others  Combining GPS and a camera would make it easy to create such recommendations, with pictures and geo-tagging all in one.

However, I didn’t get such a camera.

But my interest in sharing recommendations continues.  Recently, a friend told me he was heading to Tokyo and was going to browse my entries for suggestions of where to go and where to eat.  Great idea, I thought.  Unfortunately, not every entry actually provided specific locations for things.

So I logged into Google Maps and created a Tokyo Map that has all my recommendations plotted out, complete with links and pictures.  I’m not the first to think of this by any means.  My friend Daniel created such a map of Montreal for another friend who was visiting there in December.  I’ve also found a map like this for Krungthep, with lots of restaurants I want to explore.

Since these things take a fair bit of work, it is a shame that they don’t see more use.  Because of that, I’ve added a new feature to my blog: travel guides.  It will take a while to pull them together, but when I’ve traveled somewhere (or a friend shares a map and recommendations with me), I’ll post the information here in the hopes that you or a friend of yours will find it useful.  This new feature is on the left-hand column on my blog.

I hope these are helpful and I encourage you to add your recommendations, too.  I’m not going to recreate TripAdvisor by any means, nor would I want to since the recommendations there aren’t always very discerning.