Category: Blogging

Hotelier becomes fiction writer: A Five Star Mistery

Karin
Karin Schmollgruber

Travel Bloggers are becoming a sort of travel bloggers community of their own: They read each others Blogs, refer and comment to each other and exchange tips.

Karin Smollgruber is based in Austria. She She uses her German language Blog Fasten Your Seatbelts as a means of communicating about her PR business Passion PR AT.

On several occasions I have hinted to my interest in Vienna. Along the road I got her attention. Some time ago she tipped me that she had interviewed Daniel Edward Craig of Opus Hotel and that she started to post some posts in the English language. Since then she has written some interesting posts in English as well.

I didn’t have enough time to follow up on this tip till now. In doing so now I found out that I had not followed up correctly on my claim to keep my T-List Page as complete as possible: I had completely forgotten to put her site in.

I have corrected that now. To date the number of Blogs on my T-List is 180.

Returning to Daniel Craig:

Daniel Craig
Daniel Craig

Daniel is the General Manager of Opus Hotel in Vancouver, Canada. He writes his own Blog General Manager’s Blog together with Katrina Carroll-Foster, Director of Sales & Marketing of the Opus Hotel.

One of the reasons he is writing a Blog is that he is a writer himself and that brings me back to the tile of this post: The first thriller Daniel is in the process of writing of has the title:

Murder at the Universe
Murder At The Universe

Murder at the Universe, an imaginary hotel in New York City. According to Daniel Craig‘s writers’ site the book is will be released in June 2008.

Update: And here is my own interview with Daniel: 10 Questions for (41): Daniel Edward Craig

Last edited by GJE on December 5, 2011 at 4:44 pm

Shortcut: A City Blog about European cities

Shortcut logo

Today I discovered the nicely written Shortcut, A European City Blog with a nice lay out. It writes about 17 European cities.

It used to write about upcoming events, but nowadays in true web 2.0 style it links through to Yahoo’s Upcoming.

A pity Shortcut don’t feature The Hague.

Go enjoy yourself!

Added July 1, 2007
I changed the URL as they have moved to another provider.

Darren Cronian: Travel Rants and Mud Hotels / Vacation Homes

Andrere Amellal Oasis
Picture Adrère Amellal Oasis

Darren Cronian was the guy behind the Travel Rants Blog. Unfortunately he discontinued the blog later. Earlier I posted already about him.

I have a weak spot for him, because, in comments to a post about The Happy Hotelier he urged me to go on with this Blog and work hard on it, which I did since.

In a recent interview in Europe a la carte we learn a bit more about Darren:

His business is World Wide Holiday Homes. He developped this site into a business after his parents bought a holiday home in Spain which they wanted to rent. Ha ha, he obliged them by building a whole imperium of a website around the idea of setting up a site to rent the family property.

He was once asked to find a mud hut in Kenya as a vacation home and found it. This is not so strange and also not so difficult, as more than 2/3 of the world population lives in a mud house. Only we in the West usually are not aware of this fact. An important source for anything about adobe, earth, mud or straw bale building is this impressive Blog: Earth Architecture.

Actually I had collected already some links to mud hotels and vacation rentals in the past:

Out there there must be some more very luxurious earth lodges as well.

As sustainable or green holidays are becoming more and more an important factors in traveling, I believe earthen, clay, mud or adobe accommodations will get more and more attention and are worth while a consideration. Also in my own place I have experimented successfully with pigmented clay plastered walls that contain the central heating pipes.

Finally: a special way of spending your holiday is a working holiday where you learn how to build or decorate a home with earth/clay/mud.

Who has more sustainable accommodation suggestions?

A nifty Blogger's tool: Backlink Watch

If you want to know who is linking to your site Backlink Watch gives a simple to use and, compared to Yahoo’s and Google’s similar tools, reasonable complete overview of sites that link back to the site you enter.

Sean Dodson started Blog Idle Jottings

Sean is a journalist who writes for the Guardian a weekly column “Best of the Net” and who has started a Blog Idle Jottings in January. Not much content there yet, but that will be difficult when you are bound to give your best to the Guardian first and for all. I hope he will devote more time to it when he comes to speed.