Josiah Mackenzie at BTO

Buy Tourism Online 2010 – Josiah Mackenzie presentation

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Josiah Mackenzie at BTO

It was a busy week on the travel and social media front. First I would like to share with you the keynote of my blogging friend Josiah McKenzie @Hmarketinghelp of Hotel Marketing Strategies. at the Buy Tourism Online (BTO) conference in Florence. It’s an instructive introduction for hoteliers why and how they should be involved in social media.

Update

Originally I’d embedded a great video here, but that sadly disappeared. Hence I’ve embedded Josiah’s slideshow.

Last edited by GJE on March 13, 2012 at 12:57 pm

My Impressions from a Thought Provoking TBCamp10

The TBCamp10 After Party was best

The TBCamp10 After Party was best!

I’ve attended TBCamp10 with my camera that some people envy. They probably don’t know the actual weight of the darn thing when hanging from your shoulder all day.

  1. Darren (of Travel Rants) was able to secure the help of a very nice lady to hand out name tags which were new for the event. Mind you, he had single handedly printed the lot as almost single handedly he has succeeded to create the third edition of this event. Thank you Darren for organizing it again.
  2. What I have missed in preparation of the venue is:
    A) A list of attendants. Darren has given a link to a list that seems having disappeared.
    B) An introduction to the speakers.
    Why is that important to me? Then I’m more able to mind map those who are attending.
    On the other hand this is not so bad because now, as usual, I let my camera is find its own interesting people.
  3. When I entered the venue I was met by a welcoming warm sound wall of conversation. Travel bloggers do relate!
  4. The venue was huge. Approximately 130 to 150 bloggers and PR types and hangers on around and about. Not until after the venue I realized there were many of high profile types. Off course with such a huge group it is not easy to relate to all who I would have liked to relate to.
  5. Amazingly Kevin (of Tnooz) got the posse totally quiet as a good moderator. He introduced the sponsors and the speakers. After that everybody was amazingly quiet during the speeches certainly when taking into consideration how chatty and outspoken bunch travel bloggers usually are.
  6. What also amazed me that 2/3 of the attendants rushed out as soon as the last speaker had stopped. That was at around 9.30 far before the anticipated 11.00 PM closing. These people didn’t grasp the whole idea of the venue: Getting to know each other better irl…..
  7. Being concentrated more on catching the people with my camera, I hardly paid attention to the discussions, but am glad some people published what they said and thankful to be able to read back some tweets.
  8. I have the impression this is a very British event. Although I’m reasonably well versed in the English language, some of the discussions are too fast for me and maybe a bit insiderish… Brits remain Brits, they can discuss in circles and they are masters of the understatement.
  9. Avatars do matter! especially at such venues. If you enter a room full of people you haven’t met irl, it is always helpful to relate a person to their twitter account or their blog. Therefor I’ll illustrate this by giving away prices here for those who are most true to their avatar.
  10. Sadly loads of people were there I would have liked to communicate with…well maybe next time
  11. What I hope will happen is a nice roundup from various people who attended. After Sales service for an event is also very important.
  12. Oh yes, as usual, I got carried away…, before I forget: Why was the event Thought Provoking?
    1. Of all people attending only one raised his hand when asked “Who makes more than UK pnd 1,000.- per month from his blog?”. (I know of some who were not attending among one who was tweeting from her HQ as if she was attending)
    2. Traditional Printed Press is experimenting with paid travel content and proudly announcing they have approximately 100 K paying customers…(but see a former competitor comment below) .
    3. Travel bloggers do relate and I feel at home with them!
    4. Buddy Press is not where it should be…whenever I’ll create a community I’ll be going to use the paid Ning thingy
    5. The after party in the Beduin bar was best…luckily the taxi driver found my personal B&B back for me.
    6. Online communications almost only mobile…a year ago almost unthinkable

Okay publishing it to be fast… Will be fleshing it out to be complete… soon…also as usual:-)…but first uploading the 300 something photos….[update: here they are via Fluidr ]

Check out these:

Last edited by GJE on November 13, 2010 at 00:20 AM

Does your City has it’s own Briefs? (Dutch Design 58)

First a little language exercise: I needed a proper title for the post and tried Google Translate to get a proper English translation for the Dutch word “onderbroek” (litterally “underpants”). I got the following results with Google: 1) panties, 2) underpants, 3) briefs, 4) knickers, 5) pants and 6) drawers….Off course I could check out the Urban dictionary for each of these words, but instead tried a Google Images search for them. Then it became clear soon: Briefs it should be…

The Hague has his own comics subculture in the form of a series of comic strip books around “Haagsche Harry” You see him in the first photo here above. He uses the local dialect to comment on what is happening in and around The Hague. Since The Hague is the center of Dutch Government, he doesn’t refrain from commenting Dutch politicians and even sometimes with mild humor comments on the Dutch Royal Family.

Recently 9 students at the The Hague ROC business school adopted the idea to introduce Green Yellow Briefs. Green and Yellow are the colors of the City of The Hague. Actually the briefs are white because of the costs involved to create them in Green and Yellow would be a bit too high. However they do have a Haagsche Harry badge in green and yellow applied to the front and “Ut Groen Geile Broekkie” – or Green Yellow Briefs – written over the back.

Ut groen geile broekie

Yesterday the briefs were officially introduced by the initiators, Marnix Rueb who created Haagsche Harry and the self proclaimed Night Mayor of The Hague, nicknamed Haagsche Bom.

Sources (mainly in Dutch):

  1. Haagsche Harry‘s home page (Like he says in The Hage dialect: “Haumpeits”).
  2. Hofstijl article.
  3. Green Yellow Briefs home page.
  4. Haags Allerlei article.

Terrorist Motel – in lieu of Ground Zero Mosque?

Found on Archinect:

Terrorist Motel to Replace Ground Zero Mosque?
Saudi Arabian outfit Stealth Architects are proposing an interesting alternative to the controversial Muslim Cultural Center – a Terrorist Motel! The “building” is actually a 16 story underground labyrinth of man-made caves.

The Observer has an item on the subject as well and asks whether this is a prank from an Architect Provocateur….

Gothamist shows the “press release”.

Funny or not so funny, the fact is that a little bit of humor could loosen up the sniping in the pro vs anti mosque discussion…

Where are They Hosting?


During my research into a reliable web hosting alternative I had discovered Wikipopia (formerly Serversiders), but Wikipopia disappeared since and I found similar tools at Whoishostingthis and Whois Domaintools

So I’ve checked a couple of sites randomly to see where they are being hosted:

(Random) Updates

  • The reason I’m sharing this with you is that there are several pitfalls in the hosting trajectory. One of them is Load Time. With firebug I’ve tested the load speed of several sites mentioned above and am not really impressed. Some SEO guru claimed that every 500 miliseconds your site loads faster, your conversion betters 20%. So my focus currently is on load time.
  • I also found out that my Dutch hosting company is a reseller rather than a dedicated hosting company.
  • WordPress itself recommends hosting hosting companies. Plus recently it introduced Vip Hosting, only for the happy few.
  • Mashable and Techcrunch show load times up to 20 seconds! How come they keep being successful?
  • Booking.com, the online OTA (=On Line Travel Agent) has an amazingly short load time, less than 3 seconds. Moreover It feels slick. Same with Tripadvisor, the online review company about 2 seconds…
  • I prefer my blogs to be photo rich. Problem that causes is long load times. Since Happy Hotelier is now hosted in the US, while it used to be hosted in The Netherlands I all of a sudden see my page load time doubled or tripped. Probably because each tiny little file has to cross the Atlantic Exchange.
    I’m considering upgrading my hosting package to virtual cloud hosting, but that may be too expensive.. Another way is deploying images over a free or paid CDN (Content Delivery Network). But you could also consider to trim your blog in other ways. I’ve found some great posts in that respect:

    1. Speed Up WordPress – Ultimate Guide to make Sites Super Fast
    2. 38 Ways to optimize and speed your WordPress Blog
    3. It would have saved me tons of time if I had known this little trick on beforehand: Host Images in Subdomain

    .

Last edited by GJE on December 5, 2016