But the most interesting aspect of this particular municipal campaign is the platform it intended to leverage: "to promote the city primarily through the power of new media and Web 2.0. The campaign, called uwishunu, will use blogs, podcasts, social networking sites, photo- and video-sharing Web sites, RSS feeds, and 'in-the-know' residents to spread the word about the new Philadelphia."

The uwishunu blog is a large part of the US $5 million campaign. Managed by the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC), the blog "is your online source for an insider's look at the Philadelphia scene. Our mission is to enable visitors to hang like locals and locals to hang like insiders." Uwushunu.com succeeds marvelously at one of these goals. The other, not so much.

Covering subjects such as arts, dining, music, sports, nightlife, drinks, shopping, and the active life, the blog is written by a large number of Philadelphia residents. Some contribute often, others quite seldom. But the result is a wonderful patchwork of all kinds of under-the-radar activities one might be interested in. Should that one already live in Philadelphia.

Content in this case doesn't mean that uwishunu.com doesn't feature events and news that would appeal to a tourist. Instead it means that the way the information is laid out makes it largely useless for the occasional visitor.

It is particularly difficult to get an idea of a city's overall attractiveness from a blog that requires habitual visits. A local will understandably return to a source of information that he or she can take advantage of at any time. But a tourist, or potential tourist, has specific limitations and probably the most important one of those limitations is timing. The fact that uwishunu does not have a calendar—or even a way to organize posted events or topics by a month or day—makes it largely useless to a tourist from a practical standpoint. And it is quite a lot to ask a potential tourist to keep up with a blog from a city that isn't his own on the off-chance that an event of interest might be happening there. This is to say that while it's cool to have a platform for getting insider information out, the way uwishunu organizes itself means that it's likely that it will remain information for those inside the city limits.

Again, in its current incarnation, uwishunu.com does a wonderful job of reminding Philadelphians why they shouldn't leave. The blog also probably helps in the fight to get people to permanently move there, a great partner piece to a site like movetophilly.com.

But in concept uwishunu, and how it means to serve Philadelphia tourism, is profoundly inspiring in that it hints at a blueprint that almost any city could follow to create an online promotional tool—a tool far more effective than any online element of a geographic brand campaign a respective community is using. And for less money.

NewYorkology is not a "pretty" site. (It isn't ugly, but it doesn't look as good as uwishunu.) But in terms of travel blogs, NewYorkology is about as good as it gets. Take uwishunu's campaign goals and swap out city names—that is, "Reveal New York's unconventional and contemporary side and show off the city as a hip, urban destination that fosters the creative class/Positively impact New York's quality of life through increased tourism from previously untapped, highly wired, urban travelers"—and NewYorkology just about fits the bill as well as can be expected. It breaks down content by month and relies largely on out-linking to sources that probably have more to say, and more authority, on a given subject. (Though, we would like to see the calendar placed a little more prominently.)

One more thing: NewYorkology is largely written by one woman, Amy Langfield, and is not associated with any official tourism body. This means that almost any community with enough money to spend on one good, local writer, and some budget left over for promotion, could create a blog that would service both residents and potential visitors as long as they followed a template of favoring content over cool, which—rather ironically—is cooler than cool.