Nice job from students at the University of Tasmania in Australia where a project to work out how to find and display travel content from the web has become a fully functioning site.
The idea was to integrate a number content feeds from various sources so as to better understand what travellers on the web are saying about destinations and media they are producing in-resort.
Australian travel content site Travellr led the development work with the students and also brought in the World Nomads Adventures site to get involved.
Visitors can enter a search term on the Explore.Travellr.com and the site automatically brings in relevant messages from Twitter, pictures from Flickr and destination material and advice from Travellr and World Nomads.
The students involved - Nathaniel Burgess, Jacob Bresnehan, John Cobb, Timothy Heap, Jake Kobes, Matthew Platts, Robert Tilt and Clare Vivarelli - are all part of the third year of an IT course and each worked for a semester on the project including client research, user interface and design, technical work and implementation.
Ian Cumming of Travellr says:
"The project lets students learn skills in project management, web development, teamwork, and programming. It also provides them with the ability to learn about the travel industry, so they can further their studies in that field. This is important because it helps foster skills in travel technology for our industry."
The project was developed using the Mootools Javascript Framework, and utilises JSONP-based APIs that allow the browser to consume external data sources.
RSS feeds (such as World Nomads Journals) are brought in using Yahoo Pipes. The entire application runs in Javascript.
Cumming says the group is looking for other providers to get involved with their feeds.