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HipGeo Travel Blog and Trip Journal (free) lets you tell the story of your vacation with images, videos, text, tags, and more all tied to your geolocation. You start by signing up through Facebook or Twitter, then you can choose people to share your travels with. If you just want to see the app in action before you take your trip (and see best practices from other users) you can use an explore button to check out blogs of popular or featured users, or look at posts from near your location.
Once signed up you’ll have your own personal blog on HipGeo where all your posts will live. When you’re ready to start, you can either touch the camera button to take a photo or video, or choose the Post option to write a text blog. After hitting post, your photo, video, or text blog will show up with a time stamp and your location automatically along with whatever message you want to send to your followers. Even if you take several photos at one location, the app automatically groups them together. This running blog then becomes the story of your vacation. It also has an always-on functionality that tracks where you’ve been until you’re ready to share it. Then, you can post an animated map that shows your trip progress. That’s the basic gist of the app, but what it means is that you can go about your vacation snapping pictures and writing a few words at each stop while HipGeo does all the hard work for you.
Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET
There are a number of extra features that will make HipGeo even more useful. When taking a picture for example, you get a full-fledged photo editor with several effects to choose from, color balance controls, cropping, saturation, red-eye correction, text captions, and tons more. When you’re finished you can send your image out to Twitter, Facebook, or via e-mail, along with your blog post. I was really impressed with the photo tools making it so you don’t really need to use any other specialized photo apps.
Another great feature is the ability to set the app to Wi-Fi-only mode so HipGeo still records all your posts, but only sends them to your blog when you’re in range of Wi-Fi (great for avoiding roaming charges). Finally, you also have the option to add posts, images, tags, and other trip info directly to the HipGeo Web site on your computer, so you can clean up your vacation blog whenever you want.
All of these features make for a really easy way to document the places you’ve been with images, video, and text, on your iPhone, iPad, or the HipGeo Web site.
HipGeo is free at the App Store and looks like a great way to document a trip. If you’re about to go somewhere and want a neat history of your travels, you should check out this app.
