How do we discover new cities to visit ? How do we remember where we ’ve been ? With all the tools at our fingertips , I ’d still argue it ’s actually not all that gentle . Hi , which just open up to the public today , is a beautifully designed way to find , part , and tell narration about place .
What Hi is , exactly , iskind of hard to explainso I seek to come up with some shorthand ways to describe it : Literary Yelp , Instagram Longreads , Foursquare for Cities , a crowdsourced New York Times Travel department .
But I also care the round-eyed direction Hi talks about itself on its home page : “ A biotic community of writers , journalists , journalers , illustrator , photographers , traveller , poets , and musician research the world , and sharing those explorations through images and schoolbook . ”
From the outset , Hi works like Twitter or Instagram . You start up by posting a “ sketch”—a photo and a caption — which suffer geo - chase after and published to your stream . you may give the vignette the way it is , if you ’d like , and never add anything more , but this is where the residential area part comes in , and what make lead to Hi room more interesting than , say , checking in to a place on Facebook . The community can poke at you to expand upon your vignette by tapping the “ Tell me more ” button . Now you’re able to expand your photo and caption into a story , or “ minute , ” which can be a paragraph or thou of words . Instead of like or thumb up or heart and soul , you may just thank a person with a one - line government note .
It ’s the “ tell me more ” and “ thanks ” that turn Hi into something different , a place to go deeply , one of its founders , Craig Mod , tells Gizmodo . So it ’s not surprising that Mod and his teammates founded Hi as a place to workshop a new kind of collaborative journalism .
“ Hi is just us heart-to-heart - sourcing — by lesson — our intellection about how a writing , publication , and editorial system like this could function , ” he says . “ If Hi ends up being a blank space for this kind of journalism to befall , great . If someone is inspired by Hi and work up off our ideas , that ’s great , too . ”
As of this morning , Hi claim to have gathered “ 688,715 word in 1,823 cities . ” A click over to theActive Placespage reveals a function with digital pins dot around the world . The fact that the site became so globally divers , so chop-chop , is something of a testament to the founder and their own communities . In fact , that ’s one of the reasons that Hi continue a web land site , not an app , says Mod , so it can remain accessible to those who do n’t have approach to a sure type of smartphone .
I ’ve been using Hi since it launched in individual beta , and while at first I thought of it as somewhere between a photograph residential district and a travel blog , I realize recently that what I ’m sharing here are places . I can cut down a snippet of text and a photograph with my first mental picture of a unexampled urban center . I can recount a quick account about a secret smirch in my neighborhood . And if I want to come back to it later and alter it or make it longer , I could . It ’s an ongoing , totally editable travelog of my life . I ’m stick my own digital pins in a map .
And that ’s why Hi could be the most perfect travel tool ever . Check out the way Mod used Hi while hiking theKumano Kodotrail in Japan last October . He file dozens of moments , which could well be used by anyone else who planned to research the track . But they ’re also so beautifully organized and efficiently presented that they ’re just as interesting to the armchair Internet Explorer . They ’re completely functional as a form of gorgeous city guidebook , but it also makes me desire to get out there and catalog fresh place , too .
Hi has an apprehension that it ’s not only the interplay between images and countersign that brings a position alive ; it ’s also seeing someone else ’s very personal connection that draws us somewhere . There are so many way you could seek to describe it , but , at its heart , Hi is just a coolheaded new way to tell great tale about places we love . [ Hi ]
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