This video is absolutely hilarious. Enjoy! 😀
The William Tell Overture, played with hands
This video is absolutely hilarious. Enjoy! 😀
A review of My Life of Travel
No, that’s not my life of travel, it’s My Life of Travel, a site where travelling bloggers can document their adventures. Kiera Bailey of My Life of Travel invited me to write a review.
I love the concept of this site, which is so simple it can be expressed in only a few words, as I just did in my opening paragraph. Perhaps the folks there can take a clue from me, and rephrase their description of the site:
“My Life of Travel is a free web-based travel journal and travel research tool that lets travellers record their journeys, map travel histories, share tips with fellow tourists and keep in touch with friends and family, without the need for mass email communication and photo sharing sites.”
As you can see, this is noticeably longer that what I’ve got. What’s the word I’m looking for… ah, yes, verbose.
The site is built in .NET, which one can tell right away by the .aspx extension of the web pages. I found it interesting – uncommon, but interesting – that they chose to explain the technology that makes the site work.
Their service seems to be a win-win situation for everyone involved. Bloggers can host their journals and photos for free with them and make money from the web traffic by using their Google AdSense accounts, and My Life of Travel gets to be an entertaining source of information for many people, and also gets to sell advertising on its own to support its services. We, the web visitors, get to browse all the locations and see the world vicariously, through the eyes of intrepid travelers.
That’s the main draw of this site – for me, the web surfer. I can stumble on some pretty cool photos from different places in the world, and hopefully find out how that area is – what it’s like to travel through there. I might even pick up some useful advice, right? You could even call this site a travel wiki.
In theory, that’s how things are supposed to work. In practice, stuff gets a little boring. I chose to browse journals, and selected a drop-down menu for a location. I said, gee, wouldn’t it be nice to see photos from Antigua? Three journals came up for that, none of them with photos, and all with very little text, mostly one-line titles. It was like that for most smaller or out of the way places. And I suppose that’s to be expected, right? Until their site builds up to a critical mass of users, the world isn’t going to be well represented. One can’t hold that against them. So I chose bigger places, like Paris, or London. Stuff came up in the searches, but for some search results, even though I was supposed to get photos from those cities, I got photos from the countryside. I think the tagging system needs to be tweaked a bit to reflect locations better.
Then I started looking at photos. Most were group photos of people, or people standing in front of stuff – you know, the usual tourist photos. When there were landscape photos, the mix was about 50/50 between the good photos and the fuzzy or blurry ones. Again, typical. I started reading text, and most was the self-serving kind: I met up with buddies, drank some beer, hey, here’s a photo of me with some Guinness… etc. Typical once more, and that’s the caveat. Most people don’t know how or don’t care about keeping journals. They also don’t know how or don’t care to know how to take photos. So most of the stuff on the site is boring, run-of-the-mill, touristy stuff, the kind that’s good for a chuckle and a smirk, but doesn’t leave you feeling you’ve learned something.
If the entire site was like that, it wouldn’t be worth it. But, thankfully, it isn’t. They’ve done something smart, which is to highlight useful/popular member profiles. It also helps that these people take better photos, and usually write more useful things. Here’s an example of a good journal entry, with good photos. This is what makes this site worthwhile. What they need to do is to focus on these people and encourage them to keep blogging and posting. This sort of quality content is valuable stuff.
Bottom line: good travel site with great promise. They need to focus on building up their user base and encouraging people to post useful entries with great photos. It wouldn’t hurt to reward the valuable members through incentives of some kind, financial or otherwise.
The latest figures on podcasting
Rick Klau, VP at FeedBurner, published the latest podcasting figures at this post on their Burning Questions blog.
FeedBurner now handles 44,889 podcast feeds (three of those are mine) and over 1,598,988 people subscribe to those feeds. The two bar graphs show the amazing growth that has occurred in the past 15 months. Wow!
I couldn’t have done it without FeedBurner, either. I detailed why I love and use FeedBurner in this post. You’ll see why when you read it. FeedBurner gives me the sort of peace of mind that one can get when he knows important documents are locked in a thick safe somewhere. No matter what happens to my web hosting, and no matter how many times I’ve got to switch my original feed URL, my FeedBurner feed stays the same, and my subscribers don’t have to concern themselves with my problems. It’s just plain nice!
The NSA wire-tapping scandal
I wrote about the wire tapping issue back on the 8th of April, and it looks like the it’s resurfaced big time. Just today, I read this USA Today article. Senators Leahy and Specter picked up the stoy, then CNN picked it up as well. Now the Washington Post published the results of a telephone survey that says most americans (60% or so) support the NSA’s collection of information on telephone calls.
It seems like all that’s happening is that massive amounts of data are getting crunched at the NSA, for statistical purposes, in an effort to try and determine patterns in terrorist communications, but the NSA (including Gen. Hayden) and the Bush administration have been going about it all wrong. As the USA Today article details, they used strong-arm tactics on the phone companies in order to get them to cooperate. When Qwest wouldn’t, they accused them of compromising national security and told them they wouldn’t get any more classified contracts… Is that the way to treat someone who has legal and understandable doubts about its customers’ privacy? I think it’s shameful.
So let me see if I get it straight. The government gives you classified contracts if you jump through their hoops, and once you get used to the taste of steady government money, threatens to yank them from your plate if you won’t compromise on your ethics. It looks to be a pretty good tactic, which works great on most executives. After all, every one of the phone companies but Qwest capitulated and handed over their data.
It’s all very sad. The NSA’s methods are classified, but I for one have a hard time seeing how one can gather real data about terrorists (people who are, for the most part, already flagged and monitored) by crunching through the phone calls of the average law-abiding citizen, unless you’re trying to make sure this same average citizen isn’t a terrorist.
Maybe it’s about establishing a “noise floor”, and that’s why they need a statistically-relevant mass of data? Once they’ve compiled a database of the common conversations of regular folks, anything out of the ordinary will spike above the “noise floor”, raising a flag for further examination. Just my uneducated guess. The method sounds good, but the manner in which they’re going about securing the data is, as I’ve said above, wrong.
Quote for today
Aristotle – “What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.”
I think he had his finger on the problem, didn’t he? Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we ought to do it. We’ve got the power of judgment, we can think for ourselves, let’s use our brains and make informed decisions. And let’s learn to say no when something doesn’t agree with our belief system. The point is to stop blindly doing things, and to reason it out for ourselves why it is we are doing something, in particular when that something will have consequences on others.
Raoul Pop 