Ruba is a travel site that is particularly accessible to ELL’s because of its emphasis on images. Users can write their own guides to places they’ve visited.

It’s on two of my “The Best…” lists:

The Best Sites Where Students Can Plan Virtual Trips

The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”

TechCrunch reports it has just been bought by Google.

I hope that this is good news and means that Ruba will be around for awhile. Of course, another alternative is that Google could just shut it down, similar to what they did with Etherpad (which they subsequently open-sourced).