Found at the blog of a Estonian Travel blogger Aivar Ruukel who is also behind an Estonian travel organization Soomaa that organizes trips to the Soomaa National park.
Great stuff about turning around your traditional ways of marketing.
Paris (1): Retromobile
I spent a couple of days in Paris for the first time in 36 years. Last time I visited it was in February 1973, on our honeymoon. I visited it also in 1969 a year after the 1968 student revolts. For various reasons we decided to skip it ever since. In the meantime I had visited it on various business occasion, but when on business you actually don’t look at a city as you do when you spent some holidays. My conclusion now is that back in the late 60ies ans early seventies we didn’t have enough money to spent and stayed in the wrong districts. Especially the Montmartre district looks a bit seedy to stay in as it was seedy already in those days. But now we have decided that we will be back.
This time we stayed in the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower (XVI), but more about that in later posts.
Paris is an excellent city for cultural travel. I believe Historic cars do belong to our cultural heritage, so traveling to see them is part of cultural travel.
Therefor I would like to tell a bit about my visit of the 34th Retromobile. According to the Historic car aficionados (several of my friends) it is a must see. One of the biggest shows in its sort in Europe.
The 2009 theme is very much on topic: New forms of Energy that are already more than one hundred years old:
Depending on the different periods, generations of inventors have imagined steam, petroleum gas, compressed air, alcohol, electricity or hybrid powered vehicles…
The twenty or so vehicles on exhibition, some which will be able to be driven all have one thing in common: they are the forerunners of clean energy vehicles of today!
Among the photos I made is the Jaimais Contente (never content):
The “Jamais Contente” (1899) is the star of Rétromobile’s 2009 poster
The â€Jamais Contente†was created by the engineer Camille Jenatzy and was an electric car which was in the shape of a torpedo on wheels. The bodywork was carried out by the coachbuilder Rothschild and was made of partinium, an alloy of laminated aluminum, tungsten and magnesium.
Mind you this car drove over 100 km / hr in 1899 on electricity!
It was the first French car to break the barrier of 100km/h, on 1 May 1899 in Achères (the Yvelines region, near Paris). Its characteristics were impressive: it had two electric engines which were placed at the back of the car behind its wheels, (Postel-Vinay ones), its maximum horsepower was 50kW (that is to say 67 hp), its power was provided by Fulmen batteries (80 pieces constitutingy nearly half of the vehicle’s total weight!). The “Jamais Contente” which is exhibited at Rétromobile is a replica which was made in 1992 and belongs to the Lions Club.
See for more photos of the show my Flickr set Retromoblie à Paris
The Twitchhiker: one man on a Twitter travel mission | Travel | guardian.co.uk
Meet the Twitchhiker. His quest – to see how far he can travel in 30 days relying solely on the hospitality and advice of the Twitter community, and raising money for charity as he goes
Twitchiker Paul Smith
Pleased to tweet you … Paul Smith on his twitchhiking travels
Since lunchtime on Monday, I’ve either been delirious with excitement or in desperate need of the toilet.
I’ve agreed to put my life in the hands of nearly 2,000 complete strangers in the belief that their support, goodwill and generosity will propel me across the globe. Equally, I could spend two days contracting pneumonia on a park bench in Byker.
This is the life that awaits me when I adopt my alter-ego of the Twitchhiker on 1 March. As you may have guessed by the less-than-creative name, the challenge owes its origins to Twitter, the social networking service seeping into the mainstream consciousness.
Twitchhiker was born among the aisles of Tesco, where the queues of dawdling customers had me yearning for a place far away. Having vented my frustration by tweeting on my mobile, I recalled a fleeting thought I’d had several months earlier: would the Twitter community support me if I tried to flee the North East and travel the world?
That was on Saturday. On Monday, I sent my first tweet about Twitchhiker. Stephen Fry took note five hours later, and today I’m being watched by hundreds of people around the world, ready and willing to assist me in my quest – to travel as far from my home as possible in 30 days, relying solely on offers of transport and accommodation from other Twitter users.
On my journey, I’m raising money for an amazing cause called charity: water, which wants nothing more than to ensure everyone on the planet has access to clean water. Even if I wasn’t fundraising, I sense Twitterers would recognise the churlish plight of an idiot and support me regardless.
By Paul Smith guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 February 2009 13.25 GMT
The Twitchhiker: one man on a Twitter travel mission | Travel | guardian.co.uk
Twitter trips: liveblogged travelling with the Guardian | Travel | guardian.co.uk
And lo, here is another online revolution that could well change the face of modern-day travel. Twitter is the micro-blogging site that allows users to post pithy, 140-character updates that can be received by people who are “following” them. On his comeback show on Friday night, Jonathan Ross grilled Stephen Fry about Twitter. Stephen, you see, finds the service terribly useful when he’s on his travels. Here’s an example from his recent trip to Sydney: “Had a great walk round the Botanical Gardens: now I’ve got about 30 twitmate-recommended coffee shops to try out: may be wired by lunch.”
Over the past few months the site has hit the headlines with users posting updates on breaking stories before the mainstream media has even got a sniff. Oddly, Twitter’s status has taken off, pun intended, via the medium of plane crashes. In December, when a plane crashed on the runway in Denver, one of the passengers posted the event in understandably panicked terms on Twitter well before the local media outlets knew anything about it. When the US Airways flight crashed-landed into the Hudson the other week, one of the rescue workers posted a “tweet” and pictures on the boat en-route to the floating plane.
By: Benji Lanyado guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 January 2009 12.05 GMT
Twitter trips: liveblogged travelling with the Guardian | Travel | guardian.co.uk
140 Characters | How Twitter Was Born
Twitter founders are working on a book about Twitter. The accompanying blog can be found here. Just in a time when Twitter is becoming mainstream….
Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.
“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.
I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.
Interesting Stuff