Wat’s new to Daamsie, is new to me as well: The Travel Subgroup at Reddit
Travel Subgroup on Reddit
Category: T-List
High Five (2): about Tagging your Photos, Word of Mouth and Twitterati
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:
- 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.
- Set Godin who makes you think about word of mouth as he always make you think: Why Word of Mouth doesn’t Happen.
- Hjortur Smarason of Marketing Safari, because:
- 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?
- 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
- 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!
- 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
- 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:-)
Some Concerns about Tips From The T-List
After three conferences with dedicated sites, the initiators of Tips from the T-List decided to start a more permanent site.
The site and its lay out need urgent attention imo!
- My main complaint is that the RSS feeds don’t work as they should: During a certain period of time they produced duplicate content. That has been taken care of in the meantime. The feeds are intentionally delayed. However to me it seems that the feeds are not added automatically with a delay of one or two days, while I believe they should. The time lag is so big the Blog loses momentum.
- Contributers to the site should be able to withdraw posts they deem less suited to publish over at Tips from the T-List.
- Contributers to the site should be able to edit posts. I understand the need of some over all editing of the site, but it is clear from looking at the site for some time now that the editors have very little time available for the editing;
- The navigation of the site needs attention, because it is not easy to wade through. I don’t like the difference between tabs and categories. Throughout the site there is no consistency.
All in all Tips From The T-List doesn’t take off as it should. Presently there are only 30 some travel related bloggers putting together their content. WiWiH has travel blogging as a lesser priority than its other activities and therefore was not chosen to act as a platform for the Tips from the T-List posse. Nevertheless WiWiH performs far better better imo. It gives you a clear overview of some travel blogging.The new startup Alltop’s Travel Alltop with currently 81 Blogs featured even gives a far better overview.
The income from the site
The initiators have announced that all income from the site goes to a good cause. I am glad they announced that. No fear anymore that they will earn some Adsense cents over my content. However I was not asked neither informed on beforehand that they would open up the site for advertising. Maybe I don’t like advertising at all….
The various agendas from Travel Bloggers
During ITB Berlin Bloggers summit it became apparent to me that the initiators of Tips From The T-List have their own limited area of interest, which is internet marketing for travel. I have a feeling that their main aim is to convince travel providers that they should listen to and engage travel bloggers as a marketing tool. There is nothing against that idea, but I am afraid that when one looks at the huge reservoir of thousands of Travel Bloggers, they forget they could make a far bigger Travel Community than Tips From the T-List is doing presently and consequently are losing big opportunities and huge momentum.
In my prior post I noted that Hotel Blogs Org, another Travel Bloggers aggregator presently seems to be hacked. I am sure the participants won’t like to be part of that. I wouldn’t. However Hotel Blogs seemed becoming a far better sharing tool than Tips From The T-List is at present.
Some Travel Bloggers don’t want to be part of Tips From The T-List because they are afraid they might jeopardize their Google ranking.
Some other Travel Bloggers don’t want to be part of Tips From The T-List, because direct competitors of them are behind the site.
It is my strong conviction that Blogging is sharing and not only sharing what you deem in your own commercial interest. I myself for instance have blogged about a fellow small hotel that blatantly had stolen the look and feel of the website of my own hotel. In another instance I have written about the opening of another hotel that is a direct competitor. A Blogger should be as impartial as possible without becoming impersonal.
Dear Friends can’t we finally bridge these gaps?
Finally we should reconsider its name: T-List
While every startup nowadays seems to reconsider its name, I suggest we reconsider T-List as a name for a posse of Travel Related Bloggers.
Create a Google alert for “T-list” and see what happens: All sorts of post are reported by Google:
Sh*t List
I don’t list
won’t list
didn’t list
can’t list
doesn’t list
weren’t’ list
All very negative.
Let’s go positive!
Maybe Travel Bloggers Posse could be a better name? Anybody a better idea?
Or should we just forget about the T-List and go on with TravelTwit.com solely?
Winding Down from ITB Berlin part 2: The Travel Bloggers
I have to get this post off my chest, be it for mere reference for myself, but also as preparation for the tagging of the many photos I took and uploaded already.
Here are the travel bloggers that were listed for the Berlin ITB Bloggers summit:
- Ram Badrinathan PHOCUSWRIGHT (India)
Ram commented that only recently he started to blog, but also started to like it. - William Bakker WILHELMUS (The Netherlands / Canada). Nice to meet, dine and talk with. He was blogging and twittering on the fly as a real professional.
- Annalisa Ballaria RELACTIONS (Italy) Unfortunately I had no chance to talk to her.
- Florian Bauhuber TOURISMUSZUKUNFT.DE (Germany)
- Claude Benard LES EXPLORERS (France). Nice to meet, dine and talk with.
- Vicky Brock TRACKING TOURISM (Scotland). Nice to meet, dine and talk with.
- Karen Bryan EUROPE A LA CARTE (U.K.). Nice to meet, dine and talk with. She came in rather agitated because she had booked in a Hostel right across Berlin, only to find out early in the morning that public transport in Berlin was on strike.
- Stephen Budd TRACKING TOURISM (Scotland). Nice to meet, dine and talk with. I’ll nickname him “Our Professor”, because he has already forgotten what I still have to learn:-)
- Joe Buhler TRAVEL MARKETING IN THE AGE OF WEB 2.0 & BEYOND (U.S.). Nice to meet, drink and talk with. Our Veteran Hospitality Guru
- Philip Caines TOURISM TIDE (Canada). One of the initiators of the Book Tips from the T-List.
- Martin Cowen TRAVOLUTION (U.K.) Newly arrived at the Travolution crew.
- Darren Cronian TRAVEL RANTS (U.K.). Who missed his train and unfortunately couldn’t make it.
- Ralf Eggert TRAVELLO (Germany).
- Klaus Hildebrandt FVW (Germany).
- Yeoh Siew Hoon THE TRANSIT CAFE (Singapore). Our Asian Travel Guru.
- Jamie Horwitz CANADIAN TOURISM (Canada). Nice to meet, dine and talk with. The lonesome hockey fan who took it upon him to solely make Mexican travelers understand Canada better as a travel destination.
- Stephen Joyce TRAVEL & TOURISM TECHNOLOGY TRENDS (Canada). Another initiator of The Tips from the T-List book.
- Kevin May TRAVOLUTION (U.K.). The editor of The Industry blog who can listen and write and edit at once. I envied him.
- Detlef Meyer ROUNDTRIP (Germany)
Who seemed a bit busy with other appointments at the Fair. - Abbas Nokhasteh OPENVIZOR (U.K.). Not a Blogger per se, but trendy he is!
- Jens Oellrich TOURISMUSZUKUNFT.DE (Germany)
- Goetz A. Primke LE GOURMAND (Germany). Likes Girls (who doesn’t:-).
- Eckart Reiche OPENTS (Germany).
- Henri Roelings WIWIH (WHO IS WHO IN HOSPITALITY) (The Netherlands). Watch my sleeping with Henri post.
- Bruce Rosard PHOCUSWRIGHT (U.S.). A swell guy.
- Karin Schmollgruber FASTENYOURSEATBELTS (Austria), who unfortunately couldn’t make it due to the strike.
- Carlo Alvarez Spagnolo TEXTING ALL OVER THE WORDS (Spain).
- Ludolf Stavenga REISPORTALS (The Netherlands).
- Jens Thraenhart TOURISM INTERNET MARKETING (Germany / Canada). The third Tips from the T-List initiator.
- Guido Van Den Elshout HAPPY HOTELIER (The Netherlands), yes, Yours Truly.
- Dr. Klemens Waldh BLOGS IN TOURISM (Austria).
I intend to add the photos later.
Travelrants wins Travolution Consumer Travel Blog Award
Travel Blog author Darren Cronian has won the Travolution Award for best consumer travel blog with his Blog Travel Rants.
He was chosen from the following shortlist:
- Travel Rants (Darren Cronian)
- TravelMail Blog (various authors)
- Viator Blog (various authors)
- Select World Travel (Lee Harrison)
I believe winning from these great blogs will add extra to this award for Darren.
The Laudatio says:
Darren Cronian has single-handedly set the benchmark to which other consumer-focussed blogs should aspire. Controversial, relevant, thorough and, perhaps most tellingly, much better than something mainstream media organisations are trying to achieve.
In the week before the award Darren was very nervous and even in bed with the flu.
I wasn’t aware how nervous he was until, only after I had heard of his success on Twitter, I red his post Travel Awards and Blogging:
I’m not sure why but I’m nervous about the awards; I’m not too great around people I don’t know, and what about if I do win, the thought of getting up and collecting my award – nervous.
I still remember fondly that Darren once kicked my *ss to go on with blogging and he became a real virtual friend in the meantime: Never hesitating to share his experiences with anyone.
Keep on the good work Darren !