If you don’t have at least 20 minutes to spare, don’t bother checking out Turnhere.com. It’s not that you need 20 minutes, it’s that you’ll want to hang out and peruse video after video of towns near and dear to your heart, places you’re thinking of visiting or interesting places you’ve heard about. Turnhere.com, still in beta and advertising free (for the moment) save for Google ads and a small Expedia button ad, showcases amateur and professional video makers’ short films about different cities and places around the world. Each high quality video, about 4 to 4 ½ minutes long, is lovingly shot and offers a personal perspective and view of neighborhoods such as Rockaway Beach in New York, Salton Sea in Imperial Valley, CA, Chinatown in Toronto and about 250 more. The site is, not surprisingly, heavy on New York and California neighborhoods and light on international ones, but hopefully that will change soon.

You can search by theme or state, and most popular videos are featured on the home page. You can even download the videos to your iPod. Navigation is easy to use and highly intuitive. One suggestion, though, would be to make the stop/pause button for each video a bit more obvious. I eventually figured it out (click on the video and it appears), but it would be easier if it was readily available — just in case your boss walks by. Each film also offers links to places or businesses mentioned in the video.

Do you dream of becoming a filmmaker? Click on the Turnhere Filmmakers link and find out how to become one. This page not only offers information about the filmmakers featured on the site, it’s also a community for Internet filmmakers. It has a blog about video filmmaking, useful links, the latest Web video news, a list of upcoming events and links to filmmakers’ blogs.

We all know that online video is hot, but Turnhere.com offers videos that are a (at least) notch above lip-synching teens and urban acrobatics.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Finds.