Category: Web 2.0

High Five (4): about Travel Marketing, Networking, Hotel Guests and Guest Reviews

Gorilla High Five

Here are Happy Hotelier’s High Five (3) for:

  1. The Value of Social Networking for a Large Business by Ken Burgin who refers to a slideshow in a style I like from Sacha Chua. Ken has a keen eye for the unusual and a lot of experience
  2. Office Worker Going Insane and Office Worker Goes Absolutely Insane. There is a petite histoire here that I will disclose in a separate post if I can remember what I thought when I wrote this.
  3. Not all Hotel Rooms are created Equal where Hotel Marketing reviews Trip Kick, another user generated hotel review site. The idea is great when hotels will be more and more apt to publish their floor plans and detailed room lay out, so that you can really can make a choice. In my experience the best site with a real choice is that of Propeller Island City Lodge

About Happy Hotelier’s High Five
Happy Hotelier’s High Five is a meant as a gesture of appreciation to fellow Bloggers who blog about travel and are sometimes referred to as members of the “T-List” or other interesting Bloggers or Web Personalities.

The arms are usually extended into the air to form the “high” part, and the five fingers of each hand meet, making the “five”, hence the name, although Happy Hotelier’s High Five will always be a left handed one.

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.

The Category Tag here on Happy Hotelier is High Five.

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

About The High Five Logo

I borrowed the photo of a sculpture from Lisa Roet, a sculptor born in Australia and currently living and working in Melbourne, Australia, because one of the main items on my passport is that I miss a big chunk of my right thumb, so my right hand is much alike that of an ape:-)

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

Piclens 1.6.3 update: A Brilliant Must Have Plug In for Photo and Video Browsing

Piclens Screen 1 From ITB2008 Berlin Travel Bloggers Summit 460 pix.jpg
The opening Screen

Some time ago I came across Piclens from the company Cool Iris via a recommendation from Internet Guru Doc Searls. Doc has no search function on his Blog. A severe neglect! At first I couldn’t find his post back.

As an aside: He also recommended Flickrfan in a post Less T, More V , but that is for the Mac aficionados. I have no Mac.

Eventually my persistence did find me Doc’s: Nice Plugin.

Another aside is that a commenter to that post advised to have a look at Photo Synth. I didn’t (yet).
What is Piclens?
Piclens is available as a plug in for Firefox and some other browser flavors to view large numbers of pictures on sites like Flickr. It is an amazing quick way of browsing around a lot of photos. Much quicker than Flickr’s slideshow and also much quicker than Adobe Bridge or Adobe Lightroom of Adobe for those who work with it. Brilliant!

Piclens Screen 3 From ITB Berlin Travel Bloggers Summit 460 Pix.jpg
The Full Screen

My first impression:
Wow! Cool! but you can’t link to the photo you like. This has been fixed with version 1.6.3 and hence I believe it is ready to become a mainstream plug in.

Piclens Screen 4 From ITB Berlin Travel Bloggers Summit 460pix.jpg
The Full Screen with one photo in the centre zoomed in
and following you each time you move your mouse
Piclens Screen 5 from itb2008-berlin-travel-bloggers-summit-460-pix
A video wall alike browsing screen

For these examples I used the ITB2008 Berlin Travel Blogger Summit Flickr Pool.

Piclens Screen 2 From ITB Berlin Travel Bloggers Summit 460 PIX.jpg
A Screen with one photo zoomed in maximally

Be aware!
Today the plug in page of Firefox only offers version 1.6.2 without the tagging and linking possibilities and not yet version 1.6.3 with the tagging and linking! That you should obtain from the Piclens site.

Piclens now for Youtube!

It took me some time to find out how Piclens would work with Youtube. It is only a small indication somewhat forlorn on the site of Piclens:

Piclens screen for YouTube searching
The only way to open a Youtube video search

You always should launch Piclens first from your tool bar where it installs itself. In the Piclens screen you then open the Youtube search tool of Piclens which you find at the top of the Piclens screen.

But then you have something!

Piclens Screen with YouTube Piclens Search

The result of a Piclens search on Youtube. The video starts playing immediately!

I like this instruction video and its song best

Here is the video itself:


The song is “Technologic” by Daft Punk, also a must have:-)

Further goodies

You can download a tool to make your own site Piclens compatible.

There is a WordPress plug in: A must investigate.

Disadvantage
I see one big disadvantage of Piclens. Flickr Photos are uploaded under various licenses and cannot be copied easily. With Piclens you can make a screen dump and avoid the license protection of Flickr easily.

Rest assured: I am not trespassing copy rights here, because most photo’s I showed you are my own.

Post Alia
Today again Philippe Wolff was talking about the perfect storm he sees in the online travel world. See Kevin’s post at Travolution’s Blog. Well I would say this small plugin will definitely add to that storm!

MyBlogLog: Something Old and Something New

This is a re edited post originally dating back a year. (Yes I am trying to getting organized).

Some time ago I was inclined to kick my MyBlogLog widget from this Blog, because its server didn’t respond quick enough and caused hung pages on this Blog and several other Blogs.

My first introduction to Bloglog was by Guillaume of Hotel Blogs who had the widget already quite some time. I got curious and registered in January 2007.

Basically MyBlogLog was about counting. Counting the incoming and especially the outgoing links as a tool for the Blogger. The main reason seemingly to make it possible for the Blogger to see the clicking through in detail, as Google Adsense gives such a tiny little bit of information. Community building is also possible, but only as an afterthought I believe. The best part of MyBlogLog still is its recently revamped widget, especially because you can visualize your visitors if they also have a MybloLog account.

In January 2007 My Bloglog was acquired by Yahoo. See: The Jig is Up.

Browsing around I hit upon the Everybody Hurts post on the Blog of Mybloglog

Quickly thereafter I found The Rise and Fall of My Bloglog

and here is the other side of the story: Shoemoney is part of the problem

It all came down to the fact that a lot of people were using MyBlogLog to spam. Shoemoney pointed it out and the result was he was banned from MyBlogLog. An example of killing the messenger. MyblogLog cured the problem and apologized to Shoemoney and case closed.

In their recent revamp they are trying to make MyBlogLog a sort of center of your community building. It is not bad, but BlogCatalog does it a bit better. I don’t like it that MyBlogLog apparently allows non Blog authors to join and seemingly to incorporate non claimed blogs as well. The advantage of the also recently revamped BlogCatalog is that you can unfollow feeds of “friends” in you dashboard. But both are worthwhile to pursue.

T-List Group on Twitter: Finally a Talking Community?

T_List Group on Twitter
Thank You, Claude

After my previous post there was some more discussion on Twittter and in the meantime an unrelated Twitterer, The Carol of the Chines language Blog 太妃糖憂鬱狂歡節│Carol's Carnival mentioned the the possibility of Group Twittering via Group Tweet. That ticked us off.

In the meantime Elliot NG of the Uptake blog posted about the Travel Bloggers on Twitter in his post The T-List does Twitter: Join the Twitterati and gave a list of Twittering Travel Bloggers.

At the same time Elliot took it one step further and formed together with me Twitter | T-List as a Twitter Group.

It is very simple to use. If you want to join you simply follow Tlist. For the time being everybody is welcome. As a sort of group e-mail you can send a private message to the Tlist either via the update screen as “d Tlist” with your message. Alternatively you can send a Direct Message via the sidebar of your homepage on Twitter. The third possibility is to message in the homepage of Tlist (provided you are a follower). If things get hairy it may be necessary to close some possibilities in order to make the group more private.

Before I even knew how it worked The LA Times Travel Blog took notice and posted about it in their Daily Post

.

TravelTwit.Com
TravelTwit.com

Chris of Vacant Ready, formerly located in Vancouver but now in Cairo, took it another step further and created a mini Blog that is fed by the RSS feed of Twitter | T-List at TravelTwit. On TravelTwit you can get an impression of the discussions. This is also a great way to follow our conference tigers like Kevin or William.

A real Mish Mash!

This all is going really fast and is really exiting. I hope the travel community and travel blog sphere adopt this tool as a great and easy way to connect and communicate.