I’ve finalized the uploading to Flickr of the photos I took at WordCampNL. I will devote one or two posts to the camp later. For the moment I leave it with posting this slideshow. The reason I link to my own stream and not the entire pool is that it is chronologically organized from the checking in to the final one thanking Erno photo.
All photos are also in the WordCamp Nederland Flickr group.
Category: Blogging
Nominated for the Dutch Bloggies with Two Blogs!
Because I’m writing my blogs in the English Language – the Dutch Bloggies site is entirely in the Dutch Language – and only about 7% of the readers of Happy Hotelier originate from the Netherlands, I never anticipated any ranking in the Dutch Bloggies Award.
So you can imagine that I’m quite amazed (and a bit proud) the Dutch Bloggies jury has deemed it worthy to nominate not only this blog, but also my significant other blog Chair Blog among 300 blogs for the public voting round of the Dutch Bloggies Award.
As of the moment of publishing this there are only 11 more hours before the public voting round of this week closes and 20 of the 300 nominated blogs will enter the final round.
If you like you can vote here.
Time permitting I will be covering the Award Ceremony as that will take place in The Hague, The Hague being an official Sponsor of the venue.
Self Portrait Chair by Ka-Lai (Dutch Design 49)
Ka Lai is a designer who just graduated from the Dutch design school in Utrecht:
Based on the personal emotions and sentiments that the designer, Ka-Lai Chan, has experienced. The chair is an expression of the growth of her own personality and character over the past years. With partly organic forms and using a classic black and white leather skin, it brings together contemporary and modern elements.
“In the past I have always found myself to be quite introverted. Often, perhaps due to my social background, I could not let my emotions surface – I didn’t dare show my feelings to other people. It felt like there was something growing inside me which was getting bigger and bigger. I always tended to hide away my personality, but my deepest wish was to be able to open up and just be myself. In part, I see my chair is an expression of this process”
Via Ka Lai
Testing Clipmarks [Disappeared February 2012]
Just testing a new application:
My main dilemma is I am a two finger typist only and I have a strong desire to share my finds from all over the internet.
I tend to believe my finds are also of interest to my readers.
A decent way of doing this is manually copying and pasting information into a WP post, edit it and then add the url to the original information location. That, however is very time consuming. Even editing a Carnival post takes a lot of time. I simply lack the time to do it that proper!
On the other hand I don’t want to become a “scraper”, someone who simply imports via an RSS import plugin without any original thought or pointer.
Thus far I have tried several approaches, like:
- Sharing reads in my Google reader and putting a Google reader widget here in the side column. Recently I found out through a nifty Firefox Plugin, called firebug, that all widgets take waaay too much time to load. Hence I kicked all widgets from my side box including the Google one. Then I tried to import shares from my Google reader in a separate page…didn’t get it working.
- Earlier, for some time I believed Tumblring (off course there are other services alike Tumblr) was the solution. It even seems possible to Tumblr from your own site, but digging into the necessary code took me too much time and I abandoned the project.
- I have been using the Quickpress plugin for WordPress. Problem with that is you only can clip and paste one paragraph and can hardly edit it. Moreover Quickpress copies the original title of a post…mostly I don’t want to copy the title at all, because it doesn’t fit in this blog. Finally you always ought to make clear that you clipped something from someone else. Time permitting I solved it by adding b-quotes around somebody elses text.
- The Press it plugin which is part of the WordPress suite does some things similar to Quickpress. At least you can save the clip as a draft post and then attack it from the WordPress editor. However, with my lateral approach of everything including blogging, I use to have a constant flow of about 80-100 draft posts lying around here withaout the attention they deserve. Once and for all I want to get rid of them.
- Another approach could be using Stumble to it’s full extent: First stumble, later when you have time look back to what you stumbled and maie it into a decent post…However I am unable to fully grasp it and use it to it’s full possibilities.
- Posting stuff as WIP (work in process) with the intention to later edit and augment it, like I am doing with this post. Actually no way to go at all, because before I edit it again something new comes up every time.
- Then I discovered Amplify and experimented with it for a couple of weeks. I like the way you can order and edit your clips, the header and the way you can add your own thoughts. I simply put up the question if I could use it on my own blog and then one of the Amplify guys directed me to Clipmarks
Why I believe Clipmarks might work for me:
- You can create your own header
- While clipping you can very precisely choose the order of your clippings. What you clip first comes first. Usually I want to show a photo or picture first and give comments thereafter.
- The whole clip is clearly visible as a clip. You don’t put your reader on the wrong foot presenting something as your own product.
- If I want to add more obeservations to a clip I can leave the clip as it is and simply add more stuff…the clip remains as it is, a clip
Let’s see how it works.
Update March 6, 2012
Recently Clipmarks and Amplify have ceased operating. Even without an advance notice. Snap bang closed! Actually What I’ve feared from the outset. The original demo I featured here in this post is still left as a leftover on the internet. I’ve pushed it to the end of the post until it will disappear as well.
Last edited by GJE on March 13, 2012 at 4:14 pm and added to my Internet Graveyard Category
Mashing up Kudos from Uptake with ClusterUrl and Amplify – Now I’m a Clogger
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.
- 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.- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
And here we come:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
.
Source: P.Ling http://travel-industry.uptake.com
Posted 3rd August 2009 by Alexandros Paraskevas
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.
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