Category: Web 2.0

Chicks Away: What Woman Want?

Chicks Away
Meme the original Travel Chick

I copied and pasted the text below as a draft post for further review and editing, but accidentally pushed the publish button. It appeared I had to replace my keyboard as it hung. A couple of hours later I realized the post was published in raw and un edited format and gobbled at by many feed readers already.

It seems like a press release, but I copied it from somewhere else…I simply don’t know where I picked it up, but I am sure I will find out when doing some refining and editing of the post…. Ah it also appears on the Chicks Away Blog itself…..

Chicks Away, the Social Media site for Women and Travel, launches at the Student Youth and Travel Association Conference (SYTA) in Whistler, BC

Chicks Away, the innovative website community for women to Dream, Connect, Share and Remember their travel experiences, officially launched at the SYTA Conference held in Whistler, BC last week.

Developed by A Couple of Chicks e-Marketing and its parent Company, Kuikene Inc, Chicks Away is the first Social Media website dedicated solely to women and travel, and was officially launched last week at the annual Student Youth and Travel Association Conference.

Recognizing women travel differently than men and assume different roles when they travel: mother, wife, sister or friend, Chicks Away allows women to customize their own travel website and share experiences with other women.

According to women’s travel expert, The GutsyTraveler, “it is estimated that women will spend $125 billion on travel within the next year. Last year alone, US women took 32 million trips with 80% of the travel decisions made by women.”

Until the launch of Chicks Away, there were no on line travel agencies, portal websites or social media sites that addressed what is important to women as a unique traveling consumer, and allowed women a voice to share travel experiences.

“Our vision is to provide a community for women to connect with other like minded women to discuss travel dreams, plan a vacation or business trip and share experiences,” said Patricia Brusha Co-founder and Principal of Chicks Away. “Our intent is to ensure that women’s voices and ideas are heard by the travel industry and to allow them to create a central resource for both dialogue and research – a women’s version of Wikipedia for Travel and so much more.”

Chicks Away uses a simple platform combining Blogs and Groups. Women can join for free and immediately create a travel blog, upload photos, videos and invite friends to view and comment. These blogs can be fully imported into other social media applications such as Facebook, so women can use Chicks Away as a main source to discuss and share their travel experiences.

Groups are created by women based on their own individual travel interests. Such diverse groups as single mom getaway weekends, honeymoons, Tuscany travel and dream trips are a few of the initial groups started. All travel oriented business’s including hotels and destinations are encouraged to start their own groups. Both Blogs and groups are being indexed by the search engines and have the ability to be found through natural search.

The website provides a multidimensional on line community and recognizes that women are unique when researching; planning and booking travel. Led by “Meme the Travel Chick,” Chicks Away will become a trusted source for women planning travel as the content will be created by its users.

About Chicks Away

Chicks Away is a new social media site for women to plan, share and connect about their travel experiences. The concept was developed by the online marketing firm A Couple of Chicks e-Marketing, who together with its parent company www.kuikene.com combined social media technology, and online travel industry expertise to create a social media portal for women who travel. Co-Founders Patricia Brusha and Alicia Whalen have developed three distinct business units around online marketing, tourism marketing and online marketing education with the successful e-marketing conferences held annually in Canada, www.onlinerevealed.com; online media firm A Couple of Chicks e-Marketing and the new www.chicksaway.com . The “Chicks” have published over 25 articles and offer interactive e-marketing workshops which take them on many travel adventures of their own. Visit www.kuikene.com for more information.

I took out the reference to Idea Hatching of Alicia as it is my view that reference should not be made in such press release as it is overkill and a bit strange that Alicia didn’t break the news on her Blog…….

I changed my tag WWW into WWW (What Woman Want) and still have to do some editing, but must address other matters for now.

Istanbul and the art of booking a hotel online: Nothing Zen! Part 4

Istanbul: View of the Golden Horn.
A Turk singer and three Derwish
dancers preparing for a video shoot

I just returned from a week’s trip to Istanbul with a group of 26 and a lot of information to share with you.

Trip and organization

First I would like to address the actual travel details.

We flew with KLM (a flight shared with KLM’s partner NW) directly from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport to Istanbul Attaturk Airport without any delay.The fact that KLM is now a subsidiary of Air France apparently did something good to KLM: Flying in time. Flight attendants who behave much more gracious and hospitable and even the food simple, but better than I remember from years ago, when I used to fly business class and decided not to fly KLM anymore due to exorbitant rates, very unfriendly flight attendants, and horrible food and had handed my frequent flier card in. Kudos for KLM!

The trip was partly booked through a Travel Agent No Beach. They also did a wonderful job in getting the group transferred by private couch from and to the airport, provided two nice guides fro some sightseeing, fully bilingual in Turkish and Dutch (to be more precise: one was speaking with a Flemish tongue, the Belgian version of Dutch). They organized some intermediate transport by coach and ferry to a nice restaurant at the Asian side of the Bosphorus and finally the transfer back to the airport. They made the hotel reservations solved some issues arising from an an overbooked hotel. All in all very conveniently organized. Once more the experience convinced me that for a group you should rely on an experienced travel agent and not on your own time consuming Internet rummaging and the hassle of negotiating with hotels you don’t know. Kudos for No Beach!

Hotels
As the frequent reader may remember from the two previous posts in this series, Part 1 in January and Part 2 in April, we had arrived at a shortlist of a couple of hotels:

It turned out that part of the group stayed a couple of days in Lady Diana and I would suggest that as the hotel to stay in when you like to be in the old center and in the walking vicinity of several of Istanbul’s highlights, several good restaurants and in the vicinity of a very easy cross city tram by which you can avoid the car congestions you will face when taking a taxi (apart from the fact that almost every taxi driver tries to make enormous detours to jinn up his bill).

I myself stayed in The Celal Sultan Hotel fro the whole week. The owner lives in Belgium (hence the Dutch spoken) and the hotel has being decorated by a Belgian interior decorator. This is a very nice hotel, very nice staff, good service and good amenities, a cozy lounge and two nice roof terraces with view on the Aya Sophia, but we stayed in a standard room which is more the size of a room in a Pod Hotel than of a decent hotel room, which is a bit too much if you are used to 75 sqm suites in your own hotel. Their superior rooms have the usual 4 star size and are acceptable.

The main reason for my verdict in favor of the Lady Diana is that their roof terrace is much more spacious and spectacular than that of the Celal Sultan with a far better view over the city, the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara with the possibility to have breakfast on the roof. The Celal website is the best of the three. It gives good photo impressions of its interior, but is scarce in giving rates and prices. They should upload newer photo’s of their renovated roof terraces. At least the rack rates I saw announced in the lounge of the Ceal Sultan are higher than the rack rates of the Lady Diana published on their website. As everything in Istanbul one should negotiate the best rates.

Kybele Front
The Kybele Hotel Front view with owner in red and rosa

The Kybele Hotel is just located between the two others and is also a very nice place for a drink, a lunch or a diner. It has a street terrace and a nice and cosy inner court terrace, without view, and is probably the cheapest of the three. I did not actually see their rooms, but I like the owner who decorated the hotel with thousands of small Turkish lamps (which he sells off course) and who, when we were looking at an Europa Cup football match between Istanbul’s Fenerbace and AC Milan, wore an AC Milan shirt, but was very satisfied that Fenerbace won 1-0 against AC Milan, the 2006 Europa Cup winner.

Seam Carving for content aware Photo resizing

Ever faced the problem of copying and pasting a too big photo in your Blog and seen your Blog losing its sidebar? Ever seen a picture mis morphed in a widget? Do you know how to fit one and the same picture in both a computer-, a PDA- and a cellphone screen without getting distortions? Then you will appreciate the following solution:

Recently, in a PDF paper Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing, Shai Avidan of Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs and Ariel Shamir of The Interdisciplinary Center & MERL, explain an algorithm they propose to coin Seam Carving to overcome a common problem when you want to present a picture in various ways, or more common, if you want your photo or picture resize with your document in an non destructive or non obtrusive way.

The following three pictures will show what they mean:
First the original photo:

Seam Carving Original
Original photo with indication of horizontal and vertical seams

If for one or another reason this photo is stretched without Seam Carving applied, you get the following distorted result:

Seam Carving Original Stretched without carving
Original Photo Stretched without applying Seam Carving.

If this photo is stretched after applying Seam Carving, it is still distorted, but in an unobtrusive way:

Seam Carving Original stretched with Seam Carving
Original stretched after applying Seam Carving

The diversity and versatility of display devices today imposes new demands on digital media. For instance, designers must create different alternatives for web-content and design different layouts for different devices. Moreover, HTML, as well as other standards, can
support dynamic changes of page layout and text. Nevertheless, up to date, images, although being one of the key elements in digital media, typically remain rigid in size and cannot deform to fit different layouts automatically. Other cases in which the size, or aspect ratio of an image must change, are to fit into different displays such as cell phones or PDAs, or to print on a given paper size or resolution.
Standard image scaling is not sufficient since it is oblivious to the image content and typically can be applied only uniformly. Cropping is limited since it can only remove pixels from the image periphery.
More effective resizing can only be achieved by considering the image content and not only geometric constraints.
We propose a simple image operator, we term seam-carving, that can change the size of an image by gracefully carving-out or inserting pixels in different parts of the image. Seam carving uses an energy function defining the importance of pixels. A seam is a connected path of low energy pixels crossing the image from top to bottom, or from left to right. By successively removing or inserting seams we can reduce, as well as enlarge, the size of an image
in both directions (see Figure 1). For image reduction, seam selection ensures that while preserving the image structure, we remove more of the low energy pixels and fewer of the high energy ones.
For image enlarging, the order of seam insertion ensures a balance between the original image content and the artificially inserted pixels.
These operators produce, in effect, a content-aware resizing of
images.

They also explain this principle in a very instructive video:

A quantum jump forward I would say.

Facebook Fatigue, Fastpitch Networking the answer?

Unpleasantness again?

Hey, your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Sometimes this is what I get if I try to connect with Facebook after some of my contacts on Facebook “did” something that cluttered my e-mail in box. Usually I find myself reacting only to one in ten e-mails, as each and every company out there seems to develop its own Facebook application.

Last week it was even worse….I got no unavailability message when I tried to log in. I simply weren’t getting access. Is it a glitch of my latest Firefox update maybe? No, I get the same result in IE. Is my IP blocked maybe? Possibly, as from another computer which uses another IP I get normal access. Very strange….Restarting my computer may have helped….Yes I do run anti virus software and anti trojan software and whatever…

The Banning policy of Facebook
This unpleasantness made me remember that an update on my post Happy Hotelier Banned from Facebook? was on the back burner.

I got some comments to that post.

Sean Scully a freelance writer in Philadelphia, USA, got the same treatment to his great annoyance. Unlike me he wasn’t re instated apparently.

The reverent Huffington post’s Ann Handley noticed Sean’s rant as as well as a similar rant from Harry Joiner of Marketing Headhunter who uploaded 4.600 contacts of his gmail addressbook (so invited by Facebook) with as a consequence a permanent ban without any warning.

You can find many similar rants between their comments.

When you Google on “Your account has been disabled by an administrator. Please contact disabled@facebook.com from your login email for more information” you get even more input on the subject from other Bloggers who got the same experience.

One of the funniest I think is this one: Faceless Book

So the conclusion is that you not only must not send the same text when you invite some friends. You also mustn’t invite too many friends at once.

Access denied to Facebook

The opposite of being banned by Facebook is being denied access to Facebook that many employees seem to encounter. The UK Telegraph names a few City Firms that ban employees from sites as Facebook: Credit Suisse and Dresdner Kleinwort , The Metropolitan Police, British Gas and Lloyds TSB.

According to the Blog Facebook Observer the latest news here is that many people in Iran are not able to get access to it.

Fatigue
Wisdump wrote about it.

Any human with the slightest sense of ratio will rather quickly be bored of (super)poking, foodfight and many similar applications. Sure, poking can be fun, but only for a rather short period of time.

I should have been warned for Facebook already: Esme at Pajama Entrepreneur did that in her post Why I’m not falling for the Facehook Hype…Curiously each of her posts has a button “share on Facebook”…

Esme pointed me to a post of Giga OM about Facebook Fatigue. His approach is this: If you want to connect you don’t want to attend a mega dance party where you cannot talk. Look in your mobile phone addresses: Those are the people you want to connect with. Whatever the people behind Facebook want to acchieve, ultimately they will find out that the hordes will move on from Facebook to another place where there are no masses already taking up all your time.

So, Why am I still on Facebook?
The reason is this: I managed to re establish an old contact with a distant cousin who I met 8 years ago when he lived in South Africa. Subsequently he moved to the UK and I lost contact, because I only had an e-mail address of him and several computers later I had lost it. Through Facebook we were able to re establish contact and he actually visited us traveling through The Netherlands and visiting various family members, because he is on the verge of going back to living in South Africa again. So that is a little plus for Facebook. I will hang in for some more time.

Is Fastpitch Networking an alternative?

Fastpitch

If you look at their features as compared to Facebook, LinkedIn and Xing, you might say “Yes”, but for the moment I fear I will stay away from another time consuming experience. What is your take?

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…..