The registration page has over 100 participants! Photos can be found on Flickr with the tag “etourcamp“.

Update: Andrea Perotti has set up a Live Stream via UStream. Check it out.

What is eTourCamp about?

The importance of ICTs in the tourism field is growing more and more. A new discipline called eTourism is nowadays rising, studying the interaction between technologies and tourism. This sector is becoming strategic for lots of companies. For the new companies, there is a strong competitive advantage exploiting the potentiality of the web2.0 where users create their own comments or reviews of their tourism experience thanks to user generated contents.
The innovation seems to be bottom-up, so from the users who are pushing high and high the web2.0 concepts sharing pictures, videos and experiences.
Barcampers are the most innovative population in the field; eTourCamp would be a place where share opinions, understand new trends in the field of ICT for tourism.

The proposed topics look interesting as well:

• ICTs in tourism: what’s now, and what’s the future
• Users’ scenarios in tourism
• Communication, web2.0 and tourism
• Social network in tourism
• User Generated Contents
• Blogging, Fotoblogging, Videoblogging
• Marketing and visibility with web2.0 in tourism
• eTourism and eBusiness

If you are interested now and want to attend, just enter your name on the wiki and you are ready to go!

The latest news are available (in Italian) on the eTourCamp blog.

I am very excited to see the first BarCamp like event in Southern Switzerland this year. On November 3rd you can attend the eTourCamp in Lugano. What is an eTourCamp? The organizers explain it like that:

The importance of ICTs in the tourism field is growing more and more. A new discipline called eTourism is nowadays rising, studying the interaction between technologies and tourism. This sector is becoming strategic for lots of companies. For the new companies, there is a strong competitive advantage exploiting the potentiality of the web2.0 where users create their own comments or reviews of their tourism experience thanks to user generated contents.
The innovation seems to be bottom-up, so from the users who are pushing high and high the web2.0 concepts sharing pictures, videos and experiences.
Barcampers are the most innovative population in the field; eTourCamp would be a place where share opinions, understand new trends in the field of ICT for tourism.

This sounds very, very interesting and I see a lot of great ways to interact and discuss new ways and uses of the New Web for tourism. More information and the registration is on their website at http://barcamp.org/eTourCamp.

And here is their blog: http://etourcamp.blogspot.com/ (in Italian only)