This is a simple attempt to open up the back end of LP and let you know what we’re up to right now, what we want to do in the future, and how you can get involved. There’s really three major things happening right now.

• BlogSherpa
• Groups, and
• Developer API

BlogSherpa has already been talked about in public over at Paid Content, as well as our sister blog, Inside Lonely Planet. But here on the LP Labs blog, I hope to go into much greater detail and expose our dirty back-end via the medium of WordPress.

Groups is newer, we’ve hardly mentioned it at all in public – not because it’s top secret – but because we’ve only just started sprint 0. You’ll be able to get the latest info on what Groups is, but more important get to grips with how it works and how you can build apps that work with it.

The Developer API is based over at developer.lonelyplanet.com – it’s closed at the moment – but if you really want to have a mess around with our first API (it’s not terribly good yet) then drop me a note with your registered username and I’ll assign you a key. There’s lots of work going on right now to make it a hell of a lot better – but that’s the subject of another post.

There are other ways you can keep up to date on what we’re working on, the most obvious of which (look top right) is our twitter stream. Feel free to follow us for a constant stream of frustration and swearing as we try to get new things working. Sorry, I mean – a constant stream of intelligent, witty, team banter.

That’s about enough for now. Subscribe to the RSS feeds, follow us on twitter and keep and eye open for coming videos and podcasts. LP Labs is about opening up Lonely Planet to external devlopment – that means you.