Extravigator’s map data just got easier to mashup with other sites. Now you can combine all of the points in our Notebook with all sorts of publicly available map data from various Internet sites that have also made their map data available.

It’s simple to use. Just add the Extravigator Mapplet to Google Maps and then if you wish you can add other Mapplets from the Google Mapplet Directory.

If you own an iPhone — in our opinion, one of the world’s great traveling companions — you’ve probably heard the news that Apple has introduced a number of new features in their January update yesterday. One of those features, “Web Clip,” allows you to add your favorite websites to your iPhone’s Home screen.

If you are a regular user of Extravigator, you’ll be happy to know that our stunning iPhone icon is all set to go. Just open Extravigator.com on your iPhone, tap the plus sign, and then tap “Add to Home screen.” iPhone will make a Web Clip and add our new icon to your Home screen automatically for easy, one-tap access. You have up to nine Home screen pages for all your Web Clips and you can organize them any way you like.

HINT: If you zoom in on the first few discussions on the home page, before tapping the plus sign, the newly created Web Clip will remember the composition of your zoom whenever you click the Extravigator icon in the future and save you from having to get a closer look each time.

We always do our best to accommodate your requests and make life easier whenever we can. That’s why we’re announcing a new feature that is sure to be a big help.

If you’ve ever seen a Discussion on Extravigator that you wanted to keep track of, but didn’t have the time to check it for responses every day, now you choose to track it automatically.

Simply log in and click on the Watch this Discussion for Responses link located on the left-hand side of the discussion you want to track. As soon as someone responds to the discussion, you’ll receive an e-mail notifying you of activity on that Discussion.

You’ll only receive one e-mail about new activity in a particular discussion in between each login — even if there are dozens of responses.

If you’d like to be automatically notified of activity on each Discussion that you start, you can do so by clicking on to your Account page, and navigating to Manage Discussion Notifications where you can manage every aspect of your notifications.

Today we’re adding a new feature to Extravigator that we’ve been working on for a little while. We all know how great it is to be able to talk about your favorite hotels and restaurants with like-minded travelers. And sharing photos has been both helpful and a lot of fun as well. But, wouldn’t it be great to be able to take videos and share them with your fellow travelers?

We thought so, too. And so, today we’re happy to announce that we are adding the option for members to add Videos into their Extravigator discussions and comments. Currently, the discussions support four popular sources for videos: YouTube, Google Video, MySpace Videos and a newcomer, Trivop videos. That should be more than enough to get everyone started.

In order to be able to embed a video into a comment, you’ll need to have HTML formatting turned on in your Discussion Preferences and active for the particular post you are embedding video in. Once you’ve got that covered, all you need to do is find the ID number for that particular video and then choose one of the corresponding embed codes:

  <video type="youtube">video-id</video>

  <video type="google">doc-id</video>

  <video type="myspace">video-id</video>

  <video type="trivop">hotel-id</video>

That’s it! We hope you enjoy this feature, and use it to share all sorts of eye-popping things with the Extravigator community. We can’t wait to see what you have to share with everyone.

We are thrilled to announce that Extravigator is officially launching today. Extravigator is now available for travelers across the globe to share their advice and insider knowledge with one another.

We want to thank everyone who took time to provide us with feedback during the past few weeks. Your comments were invaluable and we hope you’ll keep them coming.

Over the past few months we’ve been introducing various features of our site, here on this blog. We’re adding another useful feature to our site today. Now, when you browse our Notebook, the contact information of each establishment will be coded with hcard Microformats.

We will be the first to admit that most people will never even notice this feature. That’s fine with us. The fact of the matter is that they are there, gracefully hidden within the HTML code. So, whether you have an iPhone and wish to instantly access the contacts in our Notebook, or if you ever happen to use a Microformats-friendly browser. The hcards will be there waiting.

We think Extravigator is great if you’re looking to converse with other world travelers about the best places to stay and dine at. But, we think finding your way through the most useful Extravigator conversations needs to be easy.

Sure, there’s the search box that lets you pull up any keyword. Yes, of course we have easy URLs for linking to or for bookmarking searches. And, there’s also the “Location Tags” that we systematically assign to discussions about particular destinations. The customizable RSS feeds are nice too. But, wouldn’t it be so much better if you could just point to something on a map or look something up in a directory?

Well, we’ve gone ahead and done just that. We’ve done the heavy sifting for you by going in and picking out the world’s most renowned establishments and destinations mentioned on Extravigator and jotting down the most insightful member comments (both good and bad) in our virtual Notebook.

We’ve also added contact information for each establishment so you can easily reach them directly if you’d like to book a reservation. Over time, we expect that the Notebook will become a brutally honest directory of the world’s top hotels, restaurants, spas, shops and museums. It will likely be a slow process, and one that relies heavily on your opinions and comments. But, hopefully it will also become a reference guide to the most insightful opinions expressed on the site.

And to top it off, we’ve furnished an interactive map (thanks to the Google Maps API) that will pinpoint the Notebook entries throughout the world. The map will even be downloadable into Google Earth for those who want a true birds-eye view of the best destinations and properties being discussed by our members. You’ll also be able to take the KML feed and mash it up with other websites if you like.

Members stay front and center

In our research for Extravigator, we discovered that most travel sites place their guides and advice from their editors front and center on home pages, while the forums are buried deep within the site — as if they were an afterthought.

We decided to switch it around. Extravigator places the chatter from our members front and center on the home page. Why? Because we honestly believe that everyone’s voices — as a whole — are far more worthy of being heard than our own. Thus, our Extravigator Notebook — which we use to record the most insightful comments found on the forum — is purposefully positioned secondary to these discussions.

Certainly the Notebook will take some time to evolve. But, with your help, we expect it to become a terrific resource when you want to read the most insightful and honest opinions on the most renowned places throughout the world.

Extravigator is about replicating the kinds of conversations you have — when you’re among friends — on the best places to travel. It’s been our experience that some of the finest travel experiences could never have been found in a guide book or by looking through user-driven popularity rankings. It’s the informal discussions you have about where to go and where to stay (and where not the stay) that allow us to find the information that’s individually important to each and every one of us. It’s the questions and tailored answers we exchange with one another that give us insight into miniscule details and insider knowledge that is essential to travelers who invest dearly in their vacations and their time off. These types of discoveries and exchanges can never be replicated without unadulterated dialogue among travelers. Extravigator hopes to provide a place where travelers can have this kind of exchange.

What’s where?

Good conversations will only take you so far. We want our users to be able to find what’s been said about anything and anyplace at any time. Keeping that in mind we’ve organized our discussions differently from your typical travel forum.

Extravigator discussions are organized by topic, not sequestered by their geographic location. We feel that assigning discussions into region-based folders is limiting and essentially hides important conversations from those who are actively looking at other locations. More often than not, an individual who’s already been to Australia, but planning on visiting Paris, won’t be browsing discussions on Australia. Sequestering may make it easier to focus your browsing, but it also makes it more difficult to have more natural and useful conversations with a wide range of participants.

So, we’ve organized our discussions into topics — like hotels, spas, restaurants, museums, and so on — to make it easier to exchange dialogue with others no matter what regions of the world are being discussed.

In order to make geographic sense of this seemingly radical organizational style, editors will tag the most useful discussions with region and city tags to make them easily searchable and sortable for those who want to read what others have said about a particular place.

We’ve also taken it a step further with our advanced URL structure. If you want to find all of the comments on Extravigator about villas on the Amalfi Coast, it’s as easy as making your own unique URLs:

http://extravigator.com/comments/amalfi+villas

You can bookmark the resulting page, or you can even subscribe to that page’s unique RSS feed and you’ll be alerted whenever a new comment appears with those words.

In the coming weeks you’ll hear more about the ways we plan to make Extravigator one of the best places to talk about travel on the web.

Today we’re announcing that our new website, Extravigator, will be launched in the coming months. In a few weeks, we will officially begin our Private Beta, and a few weeks after that, Extravigator will launch free for everyone to enjoy.

So, what exactly is Extravigator?

Luxury travel forums, with style

Extravigator is a discussion forum where sophisticated travelers — with discriminating taste — can exchange tips, advice and experiences about luxury travel.

We’ve devoted a great deal of time and resources to the design and functionality of the site. Like a world-class hotel, we’ve fashioned Extravigator to feel luxurious inside and out. And while using Extravigator is easy for even the most novice of web users, we’ve also embedded a great deal of enhanced features such as uploading photos into comments, private message “whispers,” bookmarks, topical blocking filters, location-based tags, search and taxonomy with customizable RSS feeds, a selection of background themes, options to use HTML authoring in comments, customizable profile pages with the option to embed flickr photo-streams and cork’d wine journals — are just to name a few of the enhancements you’ll discover.

Extravigator is designed to be a better way to talk about luxury travel. Whether it’s finding the best restaurant you’ve never heard of while in Prague, or which room to book at the best hotels in Portofino, you’ll find it on Extravigator. And if you don’t, all you need to do is start a new discussion and ask other members for their responses.

We look forward to telling you more about our progress in the next few months right here on the Extravigator Blog. Welcome, and stay tuned.