…though not necessarily in that order.

This is going to be my first post on our new blog so I'll keep it short…also because I just got back from vacation and I'm a bit swamped.

One of the fun things to do in life since Al Gore invented the internet (or did he?) is to see what you can do online that you normally did offline (I wonder what we called it before we had the term 'online' as a counterpart?).

I dated online. Cool…but I’ll spare you the details (I'm happily involved with someone that picked me up at a bar - offline, the old-fashioned way).

I sold my car online. Craigslist - Los Angeles. Gone in less than 60 seconds and didn't even cost me a car wash.

I found my job here at Snap online – before Snap Jobs, so it was done at Monster.

So planning a road trip online should be a piece of cake, right? Wrong.

I went to Rand McNally to plot out the itinerary — LA to Painted Desert to Mesa Verde to Durango/Silverton/Ouray to Four Corners to Grand Canyon and back to LA. That worked great, but then I couldn’t book our campsites through RM and I couldn’t rent the Jeep through RM and I couldn't order camping supplies through RM. Not sure if I missed the obvious, but it would seem this would be a useable mashup of several technologies and content providers that exist out there today. I ended up doing the work of researching, planning and booking through probably a total of 12 separate sites. It’s interesting — all the content exists at these different locations, but there’s no overlay; no way to use the content available with a process or systematic, templatized-for-my-objective approach.

I noticed this same lack of content process or overlay is missing in the healthcare field as well. My insurance lists in-network doctors, but I can’t tie that in any way (other than by brute force comparison) to the lists of socially recommended doctors or doctor-based associations. I don’t care about the destination sites in these cases, but I do care about the process by which I have to aggregate, refine and choose information…afterall it's my time I'm spending.

What do you think? Do you have similar scenarios where a process overlay (mashup) would be useful? Any already exist to solve the two I mentioned?

I did however manage to find all the sites I didn’t already know about through Snap. Just a personal challenge and everything I needed from rafting/kayak tours to National Park Services to camping checklists was found through Snap.

Just food for thought…more to come.