Hi everybody,
It’s been awhile since an update on what we’re up to here at noambit so I figure it’s time to fill ya in. First off let me say Thanks once again for making the site more successful than I had expected. Noambit has been getting more attention by the week and this is in large part due to those of you out there who have linked back to our site and everyone else that has recommended us to your traveling friends or has been a loyal reader. Just a few weeks ago I was invited to be a panelist on a live on-line forum about making the most of 
your dollar overseas…that certainly wouldn’t have happened without people recognizing we exist. Thank you!
In my last update back in…February or so, I had laid out two goals for the future of noambit. 1. To make the site more user friendly. This I think I accomplished, as best I could with no HTML experience and the limited means that a “basic” account gets one on with this host. The Nav. buttons and the article lists they link to, make finding what you need much easier. We’ve even added a Google search, a facebook group, a great new logo and homepage. 2. I hinted that we might start taking contributions. In the last couple weeks noambit did just that. Now we’re still waiting for those contributions to flow in but at least the goal was reached; and even a few months early! So with that said, it feels like that time to look a bit farther down the proverbial road to what’s next.
On my last trip to Europe I went back to a trusted standby, Rick Steves, and downloaded the MP3 audio tours he has posted on his site. Even though I had been to St. Peters Basilica and the Colosseum many times before I realized that these nifty little downloads added a whole new dimension to the experience. Now of course you can pay 5-7 bucks for a audio tour at the Colosseum or much much more for an real person but with the downloads I could put them on several MP3 players for no extra cost and listen to them on the train before I arrived. My dad could listen, I could listen and in Rick’s case they were free. Since then I’ve scoured the Internet and found that there are several sites with these types of tours. The problem I’ve found though is that not only are most of them “stuffy” and lacking in info that you can’t just read out of a guidebook but that they tend to be around 15 bucks. For that price, I could save money by just buying a tour at the site. Soooooo, I decided that the next step for noambit is to start providing interesting (I hope), one of a kind (naturally), cheap (I don’t know any other way) audio tours. I think we’ll call them “Talk Abouts”….get it…Walk-about…Talk…never mind.
What we’re finding out is that this is not a fast process. The time to put just one of these tours together is, well…a lot. I’m sort of hoping that article contributions can balance out the extra time I will be devoting to this project and having regular posts on the site. In any case, be assured that if posts are not quite as regular as usual (2-3 times a week) that I’m not just sleeping at my desk but that something big is coming.
If anyone has any feed back on this new venture please feel free to chime in. I would love to hear what you have to say. Suggestions on tours you want to have available, what you think a fair price would be…we’re leaning towards 3-5 dollars (we want to pay for contributions and need some sort of revenue to do that), etc.
Once again thank you all very much for stopping by the site, reading, leaving comments and making the whole project that much more rewarding. Here’s looking forward to what ever adventure comes next!
