The Black Country Society has recently been approached by a company whose product is the mobile phone app Guidl. Guidl is specifically designed for hosting audio tours of heritage sites and places of interest. Basically, each tour consists of an interactive map of your location and the location of stops on the tour, and for each stop an image and an audio segment of somewhere around three to five minutes that describes what you can see and gives some background and history. Each tour can contain a number of such stops. There is no cost to those who want to put their own tours on the App, and most carry a charge for those who want to use them of around £5 – of which some goes to the originator of the tour, and some goes to the Guidl developer
More detail can be found on the Guidl home page here. and on the FAQ page. The App can be downloaded from the Apple Store or Google play. You will need to register to use it, but the process is quite simple and straightforward.
Having investigated this a little, it seems to me worthwhile for the Society to experiment and set up, in the first instance, a (very) small number of Black Country audio tours, and to see if these meet a need. Whilst putting material onto the App is straightforward, I do need help in getting all the information for the tours together. And so this blog is an appeal for help. If any reader of this blog has an idea for a particular tour (say along a canal, or around a town centre, or something similar), and could help get the necessary material together, could they contact me please.
What I would need for each tour would be something like the following.
A sentence or two of introduction to the tour.
The locations of around 6 to 12 tour stops, ideally on Open Street Map.
A photo of the main point of interest at each stop (which could be a current photo, or a historical photo showing how it was).
Notes on points of interest for each stop, and the historical / heritage background. These can simply be bullet points – joined up prose not required! I will use the notes to write a three-to-five-minute script for an audio segment for each tour stop.
Any ideas a you might have and help you would be able to offer would be much appreciated.
Chris Baker (Webmaster) societyblackcountry@gmail.com
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