Call it a six-second postcard or a Vinecation.
The hot digital phenomenon of the moment is to share travel experiences and local hotspots via Vine—an iPhone app that lets users create looping clips of sound and motion that are six seconds long.
Launched a month ago by Twitter, Vine has been described as “what would happen if Instagram and YouTube had a love child.”
By adding sound and motion, so-called “Vines” are much more compelling than the typical postcard or static amateur photograph. Vines are somewhat like stop-motion videos. They’re essentially .gif files, reborn.
It’s easier to show you examples than explain. (Click the mute button on each vine below if you want to hear the sound.)
You can easily find them by doing a search on Twitter with the hashtags #6secondpostcard or #vinecation. Or you can use the free Vine app itself, searching on #travel or #vinevacation.
Or you can check out the weekly round-up curated by Spud Hilton, travel editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.
One of the leading connoisseurs of the form is Daisann McLane, a National Geographic Traveler columnist and a former New York Times’ Frugal Traveler.
Here’s a Vine she recently filmed on a boat bound for Kowloon:
Another example of travel-themed vines is from RVSX, a blog about a Chicago-to-Austin road trip taken by a group of photographers and writers heading to the South-by-Southwest festival and which included a series of road-trip vines.
Vine doesn’t make it straightforward to embed the six-second videos on websites, but easy instructions for embedding are available elsewhere online.
Will travel organizations embrace user-generated vines as part of their digital marketing outreach? Let us leave you with one more, from Yuli:
