Blog de Puree

Philly.com recently reported that Active Interest Media purchased Backpacker magazine from Rodale for an undisclosed amount of money. Active Interest Media is known for publishing enthusiast books, magazines, holds consumer shows and operates Web sites within niche or “enthusiast” markets.

Along with Backpacker magazine, it’s Web site Backpacker.com will also be part of the sale.

I’ve been to backpacker.com many times in my search for hiking, camping and backpacking information in the last couple of years and the site is a pretty good resource for gear, destinations, and how-to’s. While it doesn’t contain a massive amount of info in these three areas, it’s a good start. And according to a recent press release, it’s known for being the world’s first GPS-enabled magazine. The two areas that I found to be fairly weak on the Web site were equipment reviews and community.

The site often has editor’s picks when it comes to gear reviews, many of which are pretty brief and don’t offer honest-feeling pro and con assessments. In many cases, they’re more like feature overviews. Also, a link to reader reviews sent me to an Olympus camera web site. If you’re looking for actual reader/user opinions of gear used in the field, I’d recommend going elsewhere. Although, many of the writers and editors who are writing these do use the equipment they are reviewing, according to a recent press release.

The community area is also pretty sparse. There is an expert advice section, links to find hiking partners and clubs, a drop-down list of trail clubs and a forum, which is hosted on your basic community forum platform and looks to be fairly active. It looks like the site has also added a My Backpacker area in the past year or so, where you can log trail miles, add gear reviews, make a wish list, add trail reviews and add to a life list. However, none of the links for that seemed to be working when I visited the site the other day. If you’re looking for a quality backpacking and hiking community online, the best I’ve found to date is Trailjournals.com. The highlight of this site is that thru-hikers (Those who are hiking the entire length of the Appalachian Trail) often keep great journals of their entire trek. The community forums there are extremely active.

Backpacker.com also has videos, podcasts and blogs. I was able to find a working RSS feed for them, but they are not updated too frequently, maybe a couple times per month at most. There’s also a great database of thousands of hikes and trails that is editorial and community generated.

I believe that Backpacker.com has a lot of Internet potential and I’m excited to see where Active Interest Media takes it. In fact, there is much room for growth by all of the sites that focus on backpacking. In my humble opinion, a knockout site with a full selection of editorial, community provided, and technically up-to-date information has yet to emerge from the pack.