For years I have been arguing that residents are an under tapped source of of both local knowledge and enthusiasm about the unique attributes of the place they call home and that visitors experience as the destination. There are now a host of independent companies emerging to tap this resource in an intelligent way - and I'll review more later.
But today Geobeats caught my attention a.) because of the quality of content. I believe there has to be a filter to ensure that everyone's home movies, regardless of taste, topic or visual quality, are not thrown in my unsuspecting direction and b.) because of the ease with which I could embed the player. The whole process of finding Geobeats - thanks to a tweet from @lynnerosie, reviewing their site, embedding the player, and writing this post took 15 minutes.
I selected Siena as my choice of place as it happens to be my favourite Italian community but their coverage of places is growing fast. Beneath the video player is a frame grab of the embedding process (I even inserted my logo onto the beginning of the video).
