Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

My first contact with UpTake, which used to be called Kango, was when one of their staff popped into the blog comments of Raven’s Roads and started commenting. After a little while I figured out that not one, but two, people were posting under the same username, and before I knew it we had a little friendship thing going on there.

They asked me to do a guest post for their blog, which I felt rather honored to do, and that was fun. Well, now the UpTake site has gone from private to public beta, so I figured I’d share (yes, I’m doing them a favor) and see if I can give you an idea of what all the fuss is about. ;)

UpTake is an aggregator of blogs, travel websites and even print media. They take the information and reviews, crunch it, and present it to you based on what you’re looking for. In short they bring together “word of mouth” for you, something that’s hitherto been kind of hard to find in one place.

For example, when I do a search of “things to do in Lodi, California” they come up with several blogs, some reviews from Yahoo Travel, and a site about museums. If your blog/s are included, a visitor to UpTake can do a search and if you happen to have reviewed a thing-to-do or a place-to-stay, there’s a chance your results will come up. This allows the visitors to get real-world opinions of the places they’re interested in, and, coincidentally, the blogger gets a little bit of traffic.

There are three main groups of information–things to do, destinations, and lodging; the search for destinations is not up, but there’s a link to sign up for a prod when it’s up and running. Lodging includes everything from campgrounds to luxury hotels, so they really are aiming at any level of traveler with any set of preferences or budget.

Right now they’re trying to fix the bugs, and I did find a few, but the site’s looking deliciously clean and cool and is pretty easy to move around. It’ll be about 100% better when the search functionality is available not just from the front page but from the individual sections, but it looks like that is a feature that’s coming.

Also, and a big thumbs up from me for this, they don’t slather Flash all over the place. UpTake.com is designed for usability, not showing off. It’ll be neat to see where they go with this and how the site grows over the next several months!

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• A guest post at the Uptake blog (0)

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