Quote of the Day (3): Heaven and Hell

Heaven Is...
Hilarious Quote on T-Shirt

Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs are Italian, the Mechanics German, the lovers French and it is all organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss and it is all organized by the Italians.

Unfortunately for the creator I forgot where I found this.

High Five (2): about Tagging your Photos, Word of Mouth and Twitterati

Travel Blog Carnival Venetian Logo
Old Logo for Happy Hotelier’s High Five
until I find a better one. Claude maybe?

General
I read many Blogs and share many posts in my news feed reader. You can find my scraps in the widget in my sidebar or at Happy Hotelier’s Shared Items.

I have dutifully reported about developments in the Travel Bloggers world, You can find those at my t-list category and some of it on my t-list page.

Travel Blog Carnivals

I have also dutifully reported about Travel Blog Carnivals. You can find these reports in my Travel Blog Carnival tag.

Thus far I was able to pinpoint the following Travel Blog related carnivals:

  • Darren Cronian of Travel Rants started a Travel Blog Carnival, stopped with it and after some nudging from me (hence he gave me the nickname “Ranting Hotelier” ) restarted it with Crazy Flight Attendants Booze Bans and the Future of KLM. From now on Darren will be the Happy Ranter for me 😛
  • Karen of Europe A La Carte Blog started one: Europe Travel Blog Carnival 5 May 2008 is her latest.
  • The Carnival of Cities is a carnival with city reviews.
  • Flyawaycafe”, a Carnival of Travelers Information

If you want to draw my attention to a post, please use the Contact Page or give me a message at Twitter

Happy Hotelier’s High Five.

I believe it is time to start my own variation on a Travel Blog Carnival and I have coined it: Happy Hotelier’s High Five, because:

A high five is a celebratory gesture made by two people, each raising one hand to slap the raised hand of the other — usually meant to communicate mutual satisfaction to spectators or to extend congratulations from one person to another. The arms are usually extended into the air to form the “high” part, and the five fingers of each hand meet, making the “five”, thus the name.(High Five on wikipedia)

I will not publish it on a scheduled date. I will publish it each time when I have found five persons or sites or posts that I deem worthy a High Five. It even will imply me echoing old news.

If you want to draw my attention to a post you may e-mail me at gje[at]hetnet.nl or give me a message at Twitter

My High Five no 1 are for:

  1. Todd Lucier of Internet Marketing For Tourism for Upload Photos Correctly 10 Tips more Hits. Very important not only for “ordinary” (static) site owners, but also for Bloggers: If you name and tag your photos creatively, then your visibility gets a boost. This is also important because now I have Woopra for a week or three and see that more than 50 % of the referrals to Happy Hotelier are by image searches, rather than keyword searches.
  2. Set Godin who makes you think about word of mouth as he always make you think: Why Word of Mouth doesn’t Happen.
  3. Hjortur Smarason of Marketing Safari, because:
    1. He is the only one I know of thus far who Twittered just before and after his son was being born. Congrats! Maybe a first on Twitter?
    2. He is one of the first marketeers who really takes travel bloggers serious and who set up his client with a couple of bloggers going on a cruise with the intent of getting good coverage off course: A Great Opportunity for Travel Bloggers
    3. I was his first follower on twitter. He did two posts about his experience:
      • My First month at Twitter and what I have learnt, and
      • Are You A Twitterholic? Take the test!
  4. Elliot NG of Uptake for his support in setting up Twitter’s Tlist group that took off nicely, The T-List does Twitter, Join The Travel Twitterati! (Beta) and for his successful launch of Uptake’s Public Beta
  5. Problogger who summarizes 12 Traits of Successful Bloggers . I like foremost: Creative and Playful and Curiosity. What he tends to forget is that they have in common that they are great travelers as well, and therefore a good source for us Travel Bloggers.

Post Alia
OMG, I thought having invented a nice name for this category. Then, while writing and editing this, Loic Lemeur announces on Twitter he has become a member of Hi5…Darn i should have checked. This ruined my post… or maybe not:-)

Travel Bloggers Hopping – Meet the Blogger

Benji Lanyado, writing for the Guardian and bragging that he is the author of the web’s only regular column on travel blogs has come up with a great Idea: Travel Bloggers Hopping. He himself calls it Meet the Bloggers. The idea is that he visits a different city each month and gets off the beaten track with local bloggers. If you are a travel blogger and fancy showing him around your own back yard… get in touch with him at benji.lanyado{at}guardian.co.uk.

For his inaugural Meet the Bloggers column he hopped on the Eurostar to Paris, and got something of a scoop from Clotilde Dusoulier, food royalty, attracting over 15,000 visits a day to her five-year-old blog Chocolate & Zucchini (already a long time on my sidebar see my post Food blogs: Chocolate and Zucchini), and she agreed to take lunch with him.

Further he visited: Rebecca Perry-Maignant of Chic Shopping Paris, a blog and shopping tour company and

Finally he visited I V Y Paris News a blog that

started life as 5 artists getting together to hold an exhibiton in late 2004 (a painter, sculptor, jewelry designer, photographer and Founder of I V Y paris, Susie Hollands, conceptual artist). Within 2 weeks of deciding we were holding a show we’d found a gallery space, rented it, painted and scrubbed it and sent out a quick email blast to those we’d hoped would come to the vernissage. We split the costs 5 ways to make things affordable. A few finishing touches to the work to be exposed and we were ready. Everyone did something; donated a sound system, brought the wine in a friend’s car, painted, mopped, spoke the necessary French……..et voila! It was great success. The space was packed on the opening night and first night sales covered over and above the cost of hiring the space. This proves that if you are motivated it’s possible to hold an exhibition, even in Central Paris. It doesn’t have to be a traditional white-cube type thing either – it can be in someone’s home, under one of the bridges of the Seine, in a Park, or parking lot if you like.

Their idea is
To serve as a comprehensive hub for visual arts information and resources in Paris, nurturing their creative community through a series of art exhibitions and events. For those artists or art-curious already living in Paris, just passing through the “moveable feast,” as so many have done before them or dreaming about doing so one day, they hope I V Y Paris will be an invaluable point of reference.

About Benji Lanyado

Benji Lanyado is the Guardian’s budget travel columnist, a role he first undertook during his final year at Manchester University in 2005. He is also guardian.co.uk’s resident travel blogaholic. He spends his spare time running YounginEurope.com, obsessing about West Ham, and waiting for an Acid Jazz revival. Benji has double-jointed shoulders.

Thumbs up for the Idea, Benji!