Category: Twitter

Dunglish and Offbeat Guides

I posed this question on Twitter:

Invite

Meaning: Does anybody have an invite for the private beta of Offbeat Guides for me?

Then a twitterer, who by the way I suspect to be a native Dutchman or a US citizen with Dutch ancestry, answered “Sure”.

I waited for the things to come, then I DM ed (direct messaged) him that I would be glad to receive one and gave him my e-mail address….Nothing came.

Then another Twitterer who is a native German immediately announced that he also is interested to get an invite. Then I began to understand the possible miscommunication. The first one thought I had invites to offer. As German is nearer to Dutch than English I presume the German understood my question better. So I thought “Maybe this is due to my Denglish”.

Denglish and Dunglish

I looked up “Denglish” on Wikipedia and learned It is not “my Denglish” but “my Dunglish”. According to Wikipedia:

Dunglish is a “portmanteau of Dutch and English, a name for Dutch English. The word is often used pejoratively to refer to the mistakes native Dutch speakers make when speaking English”.

Denglish, sometimes spelled Denglisch, is a “portmanteau of the words Deutsch and Englisch. Used in all German-speaking countries, Denglisch describes an influx of English, or pseudo-English vocabulary into the German language through travel and English’s widespread usage in advertising and business.”

The most famous example of Dunglish is the following quote from ex Dutch Former prime-minister Joop den Uyl who once remarked:

“the Dutch are a nation of undertakers”. The Dutch verb ondernemen is literally the English undertake (as onder is under and nemen is take). The noun ondernemer is thus literally undertaker, however the idiomatic English usage is instead the French loanword entrepreneur. (Dutch uses the completely unrelated word begrafenisondernemer for a funeral director.)

About Offbeat Guides
Its a startup. Its about printing personal travel guides on demand, but the interesting thing is it has been set up by a technorati founder who left technorati. Read more at Tech Crunch and at Joe Buhler’s Site and here is Sifry’s own alert.

Personally I believe this is going back in time. I rather have a personalized MP3 Player or IPhone or other integrated gadget with which I can scrape all the necessary info from a good WiFi access point with map links, directions and so on. That might safe wood and me carrying around too much weight to fly with with all those current surcharges.

I remember one of the Booking.Com founders trying to set up a database with all hotel info in it. Just as a repository for the OTA’s and Destination marketing guys and girls. Just another abandoned project. Reason? No cross platform and no cross industry communication.

The video at Tech crunch reinforces this idea of mine. This is really 20th century stuff and thinking.

Ha, I wonder whether they’ll ever invite me after this rant.

What would you think?

Last update June 5, 2008

High Five (3): Back to Hotels, African Cities and Art

Gorilla High Five

My High Five no 2 are for:

  1. 11 Bizarre Hotels That Will Knock Your Socks Off, most of them featured at my Unusual Hotels page or on the site Unusual Hotels of the World One minus in the post: I know that “Amsterdam” always draws visitore to your post, but this time the Dock Crane hotel room is actually situated in Harlingen (about 2 hours driving from Amsterdam and without proper Public Transport and approximately half way between Amsterdam and Hamburg in Germany:-).
  2. 10 Insanely Beautiful Hotels Worth Traveling For
  3. 5 African Capitals You Should See in Your Lifetime.
  4. 7 Bizarre Tours You’d Actually Sign Up For…Maybe.
  5. The efforts of Esmé Vos going into the new Hotel Review Site Mapplr.

For some picks I was inspired by the Travel Subgroup of Reddit.

About Happy Hoteliers High Five

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 may imply me echoing old news here.

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

About The New High Five Logo
I miss a large part of my right hand thumb. Technically I am not even able to offer a High Five: Its more of a High 4 and a half:-)

The Gorilla hand looks closest to my right hand with the small thumb. The photo is from a sculpture by Lisa Roet, born in Australia and currently living and working in Melbourne. She had a couple of her sculptures exhibited at the annual The Hague Sculpture. One sculpture inspired me for my post The Finger of Suspicion.

Presently The Hague Sculpture is being built up again and so the circle is full again.

I am looking forward to bring you a timely photo tour of the 2008 edition which is interesting again from what I have seen.

Travel Subgroup on Reddit

Daamsie

Wat’s new to Daamsie, is new to me as well: The Travel Subgroup at Reddit

OMG: Earthquake in Reykjavik, Iceland

After trying to get some things done and staying away from Twitter this week a bit, I just logged on and got a first hand report from my Blogging friend Hjortur Smarason that Reykjavik just had a 6.7 Richter scale earthquake.

Twitter Over Capacity

I am almost certain Twitter is not over its capacity because of this earthquake. It is fluttering for some weeks now already.

I am experimenting away to get a decent screen shot from the conversation. Just to be able publish quickly I’ve copied and pasted this from Kwout:

Kwout 2

Hjortur on twitter via kwout

Am I saved by the bell?

Maybe: The point is this: Hjortur asked me two weeks ago, if I would be interested to go on a Cruise in Iceland and blog about it. I had to decline because right now I am much too busy and also because my readership just from the Netherlands is a bit too small…..It just might not be interesting enough for his client. His relating post is this one: A Great Opportunity for Travel Bloggers

Constance who he is referring to is one of the two lady Bloggers of the Dutch Blog Vakantie Blogo who I introduced to him and who went in my place. Sorry Constance!

Update:

And here a first picture of what happens at such earthquake:

Firts Picture of Iceland Earthquake Result

Source:MBL

Update 2: 01.30 AM Local Time

Funny to see that I beat CNN by approx 4 hrs.
Update 3
While in Iceland Constance even didn’t notice Iceland was hit by an earthquake, because she was at another part of the Island. She only heard about it from her husband when she phoned home….

Last edited by gje on December 13, 2016

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:-)