I think I've Schmapped myself

I noticed this in the cartoon strip of one of the London free-sheets at the tail-end of last week, and wondered whether Schmap had actually paid for some product placement, or whether the whole thing was instead a bit of a co-incidence.

I however, have not been paying for the product placement of my Creative Commons licenced Flickr photographs within their Schmap guides, which now seem to have grown to cover most of the major cities in Europe I've visited.

When they first started you had to download a bespoke player application to view their guides, but now they are available online. Just as well, probably, given BBC Worldwide's stated aim of making the Lonely Planet Guides online as well.

Schmapp initially used some of my photographs from Zaragoza at the end of 2006, but that list has now expanded. In recent months they've included some of my pictures in guides to Budapest, Florence, London, Madrid, Milan, Naples, Rome, Salzburg, Venice and Vienna.

UPDATE - Someone from Schmap mailed me to say no, it wasn't product placement, it was news to them. I also didn't credit it properly - the cartoon was in thelondonpaper and is the strip 'Em', which is the work of Maria Smedstad

Posted by Martin Belam, October 22, 2007    
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