Advertising Opportunities on Wikiloc.com

Wikiloc was born in 2005. Back then, we didn´t know if it was the right time to launch something like that, if the site would be useful for the users or how it would evolve over the time. But there was something that was very clear to us: the site would be successful only if you, the community of users, were at the top of each end every decision we take at Wikiloc. Only if you felt really comfortable uploading tracks, sharing content and making comments this would be something worth keeping working at. Thus this has turned into our motto: the user goes first.

And so over the years, we have been working with the above goal in mind. Each new feature we add, each change we make or each functionality we remove from the site goes towards making Wikiloc user's life easier, while at the same time trying to add new features to give you more power to do more, to share more, to discover more.

We have gone a long way, but this is just the beginning. Though we can't yet share it with all of you, we have great plans in mind and we are extremely excited about them. Part of those plans involve making our team to grow and to take it to the next level. And for this, my friends, we need to tap into a stronger source of income. Although we have had AdSense advertising on Wikiloc, it's not as relevant as we would like, thus not as useful nor close to the motto I've stated above. We believe that advertising needs to fulfill three pillars: allow us to built a better site, give results to advertisers AND to add value to the user. Those three points are essential. It needs to be a win-win-win situation, if not, it simply won´t work.

For this, for the last few weeks we have been working on setting up our platform to open Wikiloc to new sponsors and advertisers. If you own (or work in) a business in an industry closely related to Wikiloc content, you are in sync with Wikiloc's way of doing things and want to share your products or services with hundreds of thousands of internet users, drop us a line at advertise AT wikiloc DOT com or take a look at our advertising page.

And if you are one of Wikiloc's community members, expect the same old Wikiloc with new added value and new great things ahead.

Jordi

Explore photos taken along the trails

We've improved the dynamic map page you use to explore trails by adding a photo thumbnail bar right below the map. The already more than 350.000 beautiful photos and videos we all have shared in wikiloc.com had to be more prominent.

By moving the mouse pointer above the trails list, on the icon on the map or on a photo thumbnail, you'll see that the trail is highlighted, if you click you'll navigate to that trail's page with all the details.



If you want to try it live simply open the map page and start exploring!

We hope that will help you discover interesting trails easily in the World Map before opening the detailed trail page.

We've also been working in several bug fixes and speed improvements and we've advanced in new features that soon will go live.

Hope you like it!

--Jordi

Yesterday's Outage

Yesterday, from 1:12pm until shortly before 9pm GMT, we had an unscheduled and unplanned outage due to a DNS issue at our domain registrar. That basically means that Wikiloc couldn't be reached from several European countries (see screenshot below).



I've been working like a mad man last night to make the site accessible from everywhere again, I have setup two DNS servers and several other measures that should prevent this from happening again in the future. Wikiloc.com should be back up soon for you, if it’s not already.

The site was functioning normally and of course no data has been lost. It's been just a domain name resolution issue.

My sincere apologies and thanks for your patience. If you have any questions don't hesitate to contact me.

--
Jordi

You may now choose your activities

For those of you that have contacted me telling that "I'm a hiker/cyclist and I'd like to see only hiking/bicycling trails in Wikiloc", I'm happy to announce that you may already do so.

For example, I'm currently planning a bicycle touring trip in Switzerland and now I can choose to see only bicycling trails in the area:


Additionally you can sign in and set your preferred activities by default in your settings page and from then on see only those activities in Wikiloc:


I know many of you have been awaiting for this feature, so many thanks for your patience and for your continuous feedback. Hope you enjoy it!

--Jordi

Wikiloc enters the Alexa's "top 50.000" sites!

I couldn't resist to post this one :) Wikiloc is placed 49,818 in the Alexa Traffic Rank list. That's a pretty cool number on the Internet considering there are an estimated 206,026,787 sites out there.



Back to work, I'm working on several improvements that will go live in the next few days. Stay tuned!

Wikiloc artık Türkçe olarakta yayında!

(Now Wikiloc also on air in Turkish)

Kudos to Ersan Cinan for his full translation of Wikiloc to Turkish.

There are several interesting trails in Turkey like Balloon flight over Cappadocia or a more refreshing hike to a beautiful waterfall near the city of Izmir:



Thanks Ersan!

Jordi

Upcoming events

Just a reminder for upcoming appearances, on May 11th I’ll be in Sevilla, Spain, to speak at the Encuentro de Directivos de Cajasol. After the event I’ll be in Sevilla briefly if anyone wants to do a meetup

160.000 trails and new server

Today April 7th is Wikiloc's birthday (and mine too :) and the present for Wikiloc has been a much more powerful i7 server. The old server was almost melting during traffic peaks and it deserved a break after all these years of good service.

I hope you'll enjoy browsing trails in wikiloc.com much faster from now on.

To date you and me together with almost 130,000 other users have shared already more than 162,000 trails with beautiful photos taken along the trail (249,402 so far).

Now you can likely find an outdoor trail almost anywhere you visit like hiking or mountain biking in Easter Island (Rapa Nui), walking among penguins in Antartica or taking an off-road trip to watch a volcano eruption in Iceland

We're growing fast in around 9,000 new trails per month and enjoying a lot working on the project. More improvements that you've suggested are in the pipe and will go online soon. Stay tuned!

Jordi

Wikiloc winner of the Living Labs Global Showcase Award!

Within the framework of the Living Labs Global showcase, wikiloc has been awarded by the cities of Comarca de La Selva (Spain) and Taipei (Taiwan).



We are very happy with this award. We hope wikiloc will become a global source of interesting outdoor activities at the destination available for everyone and an alternative for a more sustainable and rewarding way of travel for all of us.

You might also watch the video that we prepared for the Living Labs contest, we created it thanks to the professional help of someone who's in the NBA of multimedia content design, Toño Garcia from ShakingBox, they're great people doing great stuff.

Wikiloc at the Change Summit in National Geographic

I'm excited to announce that we'll have the opportunity to make a presentation of Wikiloc at the Change Summit that will be held in National Geographic's headquarters in Washington DC after winning the Geotourism Challenge.

And thanks to Ashoka Changemakers we'll join the other winners, Pepy tours from Cambodia and Nature Air from Costa Rica, in a round table at the Educational Travel Conference in Rhode Island where more than 1000 nonprofit travel professionals will meet.

We hope to return from those events with many new ideas to improve Wikiloc and make it much more useful for you. If you happen to be there give me a howler, I'd be happy to meet you in DC or in Rhode Island!

--Jordi

More map layers available

You have available two new cool base maps with worldwide coverage. The first one is a relief map that albeit hasn't data at big scales (you'll have to zoom out to see the map) it is spectacular specially around mountains. It is maintained and offered by the guys at http://maps-for-free.com/ and looks like this:



The second one is also a great topographic map with beautifully detailed info (contour lines, trees depicting forests, shelters etc..) I love it. We can enjoy this map thanks to the guys at http://www.opencyclemap.org/



The trail above is a summer ascent to the Mont Blanc peak in the French Alps climbed and shared in Wikiloc by Ivar Thorolfsson

If you know another public map service please tell me and I'll try to add it to the current map list. I've had several requests from you to add more maps from Russia, Canada, France etc.. and I'm still working on them since they require to dive into GIS geeky stuff including coordinate reprojections. I cannot advance a date, hope to add them to Wikiloc soon. Thanks!

--Jordi