Is Swanky Ants a killer tourism mAp?

Going on a trip? Check out Swanky Ants.

Here is an interactive map that I think is dynamite. If you want to know what’s going on in your area this is one cool map.

Pins on the map are colour-coded into one of several categories: kids, night life, markets, educational, sports and recreation, community events, and arts & entertainment. Zoom in on the map and you get a calendar listing of events on a panel to the right. The panel lists event name and dates. Click on a pin and you get a pop-out balloon outlining the event with an option to get more details. I clicked on Kelowna, British Columbia, and discovered a Rock Climbing Exhibition at the Okanagan Heritage Museum between 21May-19December, 2009. A really cool feature is the time slider at the top. This slider allows you to bracket dates in which you are interested. The events panel is refreshed.

Want to promote your event? Easy! You can enter details into a friendly form and help build a really useful community-based events map and calendar. It’s the type of platform that I think tourism departments should tap into and adopt.

I anticipate Swanky Ants to grow in popularity as word spreads. If this is the BETA version of the product I am impressed.

My two suggested improvements include:
Colour-code the events shown on the events calendar panel (text or graphic) so that the pin on the map can be better linked to the events listed to the right.

Have a small SwankyAnts logo that can be shared and placed on your own website, to show you are a member of the Army of SwankyAnts.

Swanky Ants provides the platform to create a truly community-based product that has tremendous value. A lot of thinking has gone into this product. It has potential for tremendous growth into other map-based products (hospitals, police stations, information booths, eating places, churches, video, audio etc.) and in licensing/franchising the system to other geographic countries/regions. I also see huge potential for geographically/event-targeted advertising, aside from Google Ads.

Go make a land grab and post your event on this great platform.

Swanky Ants is owned and operated by Swanky Ants Enterprises Ltd. out of Victoria, British Columbia and can be reached at info[at]swankyants.com.