Sleep? What sleep? My new business launches in about a week

Actually, it’s not that bad, but I’m certainly getting some of the frenetic startup-flavored experience as my partner Becky McCray and I prepare to launch a new online business next week.

I’ve been writing about tourism and the social Web on another blog for a couple of months (Sheila’s Guide to the Good Stuff) and now we’re preparing to open the digital doors to a learning community for tourism professionals.

We’d like to think we know something about travel, tourism and social media, so we’re sticking our flag in the ground at the intersection of all that and launching a paid membership site called Tourism Currents.

We’re really excited about bringing useful, practical information to a wide variety of Convention and Visitors Bureaus (CVBs,) Chambers of Commerce, PR professionals who work in tourism, heritage/preservation organizations, agritourism, festival planners – really anyone involved in destination marketing.

Becky and I plan to feature tourism-specific training materials, a moderated forum, exclusive interviews with social media and tourism experts and round table Q&A sessions. For example, we don’t want to just “teach basic video,” we want to “show you how to shoot a simple video walking tour of your historic downtown.”

Texas tourism expert Sarah Page just blogged about us on her Tourism Tech site.

Since magic fairies haven’t shown up to build the site and create all of the content for us, it looks like we’ll have to do it ourselves.

Shucks.  Pour me some more coffee, would you?