Category: L-List

Happy Hotelier banned from Facebook?

Your account has been disabled by an administrator. Please contact disabled@facebook.com from your login email for more information.

That is the message I get on my login page after I have invited a couple of fellow members of the T-List group on Facebook (Facebook | T-List Group) as friends. I really don’t know what I did wrong. Did I invite too many fellow T-Listers in one session? If that is the case, it would be helpful if one got a warning in the inviting process, such as MyBlogLog does by simply indicating that you are linking to too many persons for the day after they had to limit the daily hooking up to a maximum of 20 because frequent hooking up generated too much traffic on their site. I didn’t keep count of the number of invites I sent, but it were maybe 12 or 15 invites, on a total number of group members of not more that 35 or 38 and several members are (or better said maybe “were”) on my Friends list already.

I have send an e-mail inquiry as suggested, even two, but am getting nothing else back than an automatic reply that they “are looking into it and will answer as soon as possible”.

Thereafter I noted several times that the site was not approachable. Are they facing capacity problems or are they maybe subject to a hackers attack and trying to plug the holes? I can imagine that, like credit card companies, Facebook has tons of information that hackers would drivel about. There are already some rumors in the Blog community that the information Facebook collects makes it very vulnerable for identity theft.

By this action Facebook has definitely sunken on my radar and on my list of possible platforms for building a T-List and a L-List Community. Isn’t that what communities are about: Linking with as much as possible people with the same passion?

Post Alia (added August 3, 2007)

Facebook reinstated me yesterday and explained that a Facebook user is not allowed to send the same text several times as such could be construed as spam…..that is exactly what I did with several invites. No warning was given, at least not noticed by me. The site was on and off, so maybe that caused the problem of not showing the warning. Sending several invites without text is not considered as spam. I still don’t get it…..

T-List and L-List: The Next Step: Community Building!

Time for an update on the T-List and the L-List:

First some history:

  • On March 2, 2007 the T-List was launched by Quebec (CAN) based Mathieu Ouellet of Radaron who modeled it after the Z List, originally launched by Mack Collier of Viral garden.

    Mathieu now states in a response to Leeds (UK) based Darren Cronian’s provocative and funny The Death of The T-List:

    I’ve created the T-List for fun and also to see the impact it could have in the tourism&travel bloggers environment.

    If you take a look at my own blog, you’ll see that I talked about the T-List only once since it started. Exactly the same number of times you did. I’m not the hardest defender of the T-list. haha ; )

    I’m bored of the T-List itself but if there is something to remember from it, it’s that there are a lot of tourism & travel bloggers which would like to connect with each other. Is it good or bad? I don’t think there is something bad doing that. I don’t have personally any particular plan about it but I guess that some people do. Good for them.

    I found some interesting blogs/people with it so I’m totally happy 😉

  • Shortly thereafter. on March 7, 2007 Lake District (UK) based Paul Johnson of A Luxury Travel Blog launched the L-List, modeled after the T-List.
  • I have since tried to keep a tab on the development of both lists on my Happy Hotelier deli.icio.us driven page T-List and L-List. Currently I count 185 Blogs on the T-List an 49 Blogs on the L-List.
  • On June 14, 2007 after a quiet period, London (UK) based Kevin May of The Travolution Blog revives the T-List with his post Revisiting the T-List.
  • On June 16, 2007 Keith of Tripcart reorganizes the T-List with his post The T-List Reloaded and presents it in a nice way (a lot of work!).
  • On June 27, 2007 Scott Rains of The Rolling Rains Report copies and pastes this reorganized T-List in his post TripCart Spotlights the T-List.
  • On July 11, 2007 Intermundial shows us The T-List Reloaded.
  • On July 17, 2007 Darren Cronian posts his The Death of the T-List.
  • Also on July 17, 2007 London (UK) based Guillaume Thevenot of Hotel Blogs 2.0 posts a reply in another tongue in cheek post: Battle of the Blogs regarding the T-List.

Sofar the T-List history part and now the community building part of some T-Listers:

  • Barcelona Based Albert Barra had set up Travel in Blogs. I noted this here in my post Travel in Blogs: A new Travel community? and showed some scepsis. Albert replied correctly to my sceptical questions:

    Hello all,
    I’m Albert Barra, I have been reading all comments and articles regarding my blog and TravelinBlogs.com and decided to post to clarify your concerns.

    TravelinBlogs is an idea that came up between me and other bloggers some time ago. It was an idea that was created time ago when we noticed that there were very few interesting blogs about tourism, travel and Hospitality, and we considered it would be a good idea to put them all together or just listing them would be fine.

    The original project was called thBlogs.com and we started with it by posting manually those articles we liked. It has never been an interest on making business out of it.

    Danay, who is actually my wife, runs the site, and the admin user you mentioned is here. There is no machine thing at TravelinBlogs, but just RSS syndication of those blogs we like, and yours is one of them.

    Then came the T-list and we discovered new blogs. Some of them posted about TiB, and traffic increased fast.

    We still understand that having a Digg like project for the Travel and Hospitality would be of interest not just for the readers, but also for the bloggers as it allow them to get noticed and get extra traffic.

    Regarding your concerns about the reason why there are also categories in Spanish, the answer is quite simple, my blog which is considered of the best Spanish hospitality ones is in Spanish. There are also excellent Spanish blogs that deserve being promoted,and we post their articles at the site manually. Since then they are getting new readers from Germany that understand Spanish, and had no idea that those blogs existed. And last, our idea was also creating categories in German where there are also fantastic blogs, and French, but we are not so fluent in those languages to translate the categories.

    I hope I have clarified some of your concerns. You are welcome to visit the site.

    Albert Barra

    I joined the site and rummaged around. Look for yourself to see who from the T-List is also rummaging around. Thus far there is not a lot of communication going on between the contributors.

  • The Beta launch of VibeAgent, who by the way finalized an angel seed round today, also drew some T-Listers as beta testers which resulted in some contacts between them.
  • Then Vancouver Based Chris Clarke, also known as Chrispitality from his Blog Crispitality media Blog, a hotel industry blogger on Vacant Ready who earlier had set up the hilarious site Bed Jump Com as a stand alone which he later syndicated with Hotels by City, launched Hospitality Wiki as an experiment. He couldn’t find a relevant, interesting hospitality-specific online wiki anywhere, so he has created one and asks to participate! You will find some t-Listers there as well. Have a look.
    As a side note: have a look at this bed jumping project mentioned on Worldhum
  • There is another T-Lister who is setting up a T-List aggregator, but I lost the URL. When I find it I will fill it in here.
  • On July 4, 2007 Eric Daams (AKA Dr Pepper), A young Dutchman, living Down Under, who contributes with his brother Peter Daams who also lives Down Under, and with a third Dutchman, probably their oldest brother, Sam Daams (AKA Sam I am), who lives in Norway, to the Blog From the Swiveling Chair from the Travelerspoint travel community a post 12 Blogs I Like.
    Actually the format of this post gives me a great idea! Suppose each T-Lister posts about the 5 best posts he has seen on T-List blogs in the past week, or the past month. Then you get some real synergie! Then you really start building a community!
  • Then, on July 15, 2007 Vancouver (BC) based Jens Traenhart of the Tourism Internet Marketing Blog proposes in an excellent post T-List on Facebook to the T-Listers to join the Facebook | T-List Group. Currently there are 34 members. Have a look!
  • Finally: Off course Paul Johnson couldn’t stay behind and created via The L-List on Facebook the Facebook | L-List Community, currently with 8 members

So those are exciting developments and give plenty a possibility to building T-List and L-List communities. The only question is: which forum will prevail in a couple of months?

Note:
In researching one and another I added some details after the publication date.

Last edited by GJE on December 6, 2011 at 8:38 am

VibeAgent: The ultimate web 2.0 hotel site?

VibeAgent Home Page

Recently VibeAgent launched its beta testing … finally…it was supposed to launch half April: As my DW says every day: “I hate those computers, there is always something!”

Eons ago, actually in March 2007, Adam Healy, co founder of VibeAgent, very kindly noted my T-List and L-List page in a post Most Comprehensive List of Travel Blogs Ever of the VibeAgent Blog that he apparently maintains to warm up the travel community for VibeAgent. Oops and now I noticed I didn’t add VibeAgent Blog to the T-List, although technically he didn’t add any content there. Ha ha, in the VibeAgent terms he acted there as a wallflower. Omission repaired in the meantime.

Adam promised me an invite to VibeAgent once the Beta would be launched. I got a bit sad when the invite didn’t arrive, while I saw Guillaume posting something about VibeAgent Hotel Blogs by Guillaume Thevenot a month ago and Les Explorers two weeks ago.

A couple of days ago the invite landed in my mailbox. Hurray

I rummaged around in the site a bit.

Presently Jens Traenhart has probably the most extensive post about VibeAgent. It is worthwhile reading!

What is VibeAgent About?

It is meant to be a community that shares hotel reviews on the one hand and combines that with best price searching on the other hand.

The members are called Agents. They write the reviews. They are unpaid.

VibeAgent has teamed up with an impressive list of travel and hotel portals at the back end, like Price Line, Booking.com and many others.

If you want to write a review about a hotel somewhere, VibeAgent comes with an impressive list of hotels in the area you chose. All automatically and truely web2.0 alike. At this stage 83.000 hotels are accessible.

There will be no advertising on the site. This is a big advantage as for instance on TripAdvisor a lot of bandwidth is taken by all the ads.

On the other hand it will act as a meta search engine for all the providers of accommodation. A sort of portal to the portals.

It claims that if you are searching for a hotel they have the best available price for you. However in this beta phase you get only the result. There is no short list as I have seen on other price comparison sites.

A big advantage above other sites that generate user reviews, is that if you participate you can communicate with the fellow reviewers. Hopefully that sifts out the biased reviews.

In the meantime the number of invitees is growing exponentially to a couple of hundreds. I am curious to see if they can meet up the requested bandwidth ultimately.

How will VibeAgent cover its costs? It will receive a percentage from the bookings made.

Well we will see and I will keep you posted.

By the way, it was Esme’s today’s post, actually more of a rant, on Pajama Entrepreneur who triggered this post.

After The T-List: The L-List

On 7th March Paul Johnson of A Luxury Travel Blog launched the L-List

Calling all luxury bloggers!

Inspired by the recent T-List that’s doing the rounds, I thought it’s about time we started an L-List. As you may have guessed, L-List stands for Luxury List, and it provides luxury bloggers a means of being discovered. You might be blogging about any aspect of the luxury arena… cars… fashion… food and wine… travel… whatever. My goal is simple: I want the hard work of many luxury bloggers out there (Allison, Ava, Courtney, Deidre, Mary, Nicole, etc. – note to self: where are all the male luxury bloggers?!) to be recognized and hopefully the L-List can help in achieving that.

Pffff I am counting already 27 Blogs…What do I add?

Happy Reading over the weekend!

Well, I did believe I Blog about Luxury Travel and Luxury Accommodation…if you don’t believe me, please check out Happy Hotelier’s Luxury Tag, but alas I didn’t make it (yet) to the L-List (-:.

Look here for Paul’s Technorati Ranking.

Finally: From now on I will try to stay away from Lists for some time, because it can easily become an addiction 🙂

Added 14 March:

Well nobody less than Mary Winston Nicklin of The Informed Traveller was so kind to add me to the list.