Mashing up Kudos from Uptake with ClusterUrl and Amplify – Now I’m a Clogger

Uptake-Travel-Industry-Blog

The good people, more precisely P.Ling, at Uptake’s Travel Industry Blog ranked me among their top 15 Hotel Blogs. Thank you P. Ling at Uptake! Alas Uptake has discontinued since.

For me a reason to look again at one of my favorite posts: Blogging Hotel Insiders. I had 40 Blogging hotel insiders. My choice was a bit wider on the one hand and a bit narrower on the other hand: I did not include some Travel Industry Blogs. In addition there are still a some to be added. So I updated my post and put it in the sidebar as one of my favorite posts.

Another Blogger used the Uptake Blog for the following snipped which I was able to retrieve via a Google link by the comment of Elliott NG:

Hotel Blogging: 15 Blogs that Attract Interest

Like every other sector, the hotel industry too has it’s own set of A-list bloggers who lead the conversation. These 15 hotel blogs and their bloggers listed here offer their readers the best hospitality experience, so to speak.

  1. Hotelchatter – Hotelchatter, along with sister publication Jaunted, is published by SFO Media, which is now owned by Conde Nast.
    Offers breaking news and genuine hotel reviews with on-location, view and anti-view posts. Hotelchatter does an excellent job of hammering new hotel openings with posts and follow-ups well before the hotel is anywhere near opening it’s doors.
  2. Hotel Check-in – USA Today blog run by Barbara De Lollis, focusing mainly on business travel and new developments in the hotel industry. Also shares plenty of hotel deals and entertaining news stories related to hotels. Hotel Check-in leverages it’s brand quite often to attract guest posts by CEO’s and senior executives from the hotel industry.
  3. Uptake Hotels blog – Very dedicated group of hotel bloggers, with plenty of reviews and tips for finding the right hotels. Color me biased, but Uptake’s Hotels blog would merit a mention on this list even if it was being compiled elsewhere.
  4. Hotel News Now – HNN is a division of Smith Travel Research, which gives this blog exclusive access to all kinds of data and insight into the latest trends and reports for the global hotel industry. It also helps to have the Managing Director, President and CEO of STR blogging for you. Very useful blog if you need the latest facts and figures for presentations or articles.
  5. Hotels Magazine – Not just a blog, but blogs – 10 of them. Each blog authored by industry experts with decades of relevant industry experience. For example, Lyndall De Marco, co-author of the Eco-Speak blog, was executive director of the International Tourism Partnership and runs a consultancy which helps clients merge profitability with sustainability. The other co-author, Ray Burger, is president and founder of Pineapple Hospitality Inc., with over 30 years of experience in the lodging industry.
  6. Hotel Law Blog – This blog is a part of the Global Hospitality Group, and again, authored by a terrific group of heavily experienced hotel lawyers led by Jim Butler and senior hospitality industry executives. If it has anything to do with hotel financing or legal issues affecting the hospitality industry, then you’ll find it here.
  7. And here we come:

  8. Three hotel bloggers who seem to have all their ducks lined up properly include Josiah Mackenzie of HotelMarketingStrategies.com, the Happy Hotelier, and Guillaume Thevenot of Hotel-Blogs.com.
  9. Mention also needs to be made of two blogs – Gadling and LA Times’ Daily Deal blog – which aren’t exactly limited to hotels. It’s a compliment to these blogs and their writers that the range, quality and quantity of their hotel related content beats the offerings of many blogs which are solely devoted to hotels.
  10. You might also enjoy checking out these three ’company’ blogs – Bill Marriott’s Blog (Marriott on the Move), the Dealbase blog, and Oyster Hotel Reviews blog.
  11. And lastly, did you know about the TA hotel reviews which don’t get published? You can find them on the We Are Not Making This Up blog
  12. .

    Source: P.Ling http://travel-industry.uptake.com
    Posted 3rd August 2009 by Alexandros Paraskevas

clusters

Then, thanks to @CleverClogs of Clever Clogs – what’s in a name, see below:-) – I found ClusterUrl [Update: Disconinued Since] and as a test put the 15 mentioned by Uptake in a Cluster: Top 15 Hotel Blogs and Bloggers according to Uptake.

About ClusterUrl
ClusterUrl is a simple mash up to avoid having your browser open with umpteen screens. Instead you can put them in a Cluster and refer back to the cluster and share various links with your friends or readers. For the time being I have this one published at the bottom of my sidebar.

login-amplify

Then Amplify [Also discuntinued in March 2012] found me and had me fiddling around with it. Now what is Amplify? It is a Multi User WordPress blog where you can dump clippings of sites you are browsing for later reading or for sharing via Twitter. It has some nifty features and it is free. So it is a ClipLog or abbreviated a Clog. As a Dutchman, or inhabitant of Cloggieland as my foreign friends tend to tease me, this new term appeals to me. From now on I’m a Clogger. Look it up! Here is my little Amplify stream.

About Amplify

Amplify was developed by the same company that created Clipmarks.com. Clipmarks, based in New York City, is majority-owned and operated by its employees. Forbes Media holds a minority interest in the company. The Company’s philosophy on information sharing is comprised of three main principles: (i) people can do a better job than algorithms of filtering the massive amount of information that’s available on the web; (ii) serendipitous discovery is often more compelling than information organized by topic; and (iii) limiting the length of shared content allows people to learn about more topics than they would otherwise have time or patience for.
Amplify was created to serve the needs of two audiences that are not the focus of Clipmarks.com: (i) Twitter users; and (ii) Groups.

Post Alia
Both have in common that they draw traffic away from your blog on the one hand. On the other hand it can draw traffic to your blog from the specific community….

The same problem you have with syndicating your content.

A pregnant example of problems with syndication is Uptake’s post. If I look at Technorati, it is not Uptake who links to me, but PhocusWright where they syndicated this post…although technorati is fast sliding in oblivion when it continues to behave so wobbly as it does now already for months..Apparently PhocusWright has a higher Technorati ranking than Uptake today… Nowadays WordPress uses Google for it’s track backs. So in my WP Dashboard Google gives the original track back. You see? I’ll never understand SEO….

Last edited by GJE on March 13, 2012 at 4:11 pm and added to my Internet Graveyard category

2 thoughts on “Mashing up Kudos from Uptake with ClusterUrl and Amplify – Now I’m a Clogger”

  1. Hi Guido. The world of syndication and resyndication can be concerning, but we’ve been pretty open about syndicating our content to places like PhoCusWright Connect and Travdex Connect. I’d rather get the content out there and promote our blog, and I’m less worried about the power of these aggregators to prevent serious readers from coming to our site or reading our content via RSS Reader.

    I think the point you are making is that Technorati seems to be giving “credit” to our copy of the content on PhoCusWright vs. the original content. Is that the point you are making?

    I checked Google and did this search on the first sentence of our post. (search query)
    Google seems to credit us and put all the other copies under “omitted results.” Google is very smart about determining which is the original version of the content, so I’m less worried about all these copies out there.

  2. Hi Elliott,
    Glad an expert tuned in! Since I moved over to the Thesis Theme for this blog I’ve started paying more attention to and reading more and more about SEO, because Thesis is “SEO optimized”. While doing that I’m getting more and more confused:-)

    I used to take the same position as you. “Let my content been shared and reach as many people as possible”.

    There are strong advocates against this who say:”Be careful with syndicating” you lose ranking or position…

    I notice there are syndicators who syndicate in a way that is not disruptive to your page ranking or positioning and those who are disruptive and believed the way PhocusWright Content “does it” is a disruptive one.

    That triggered my question to you about your feelings as you are doing a great job with Uptake!

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