Nov 18, 2009 13:28 - By: Whit Honea
Are you cold and wanting to get away? Are there visions of beaches in your head – or maybe falling leaves and fresh snow? Also, turkey. Then read on, gentle reader, read on.
No booking fees and a $200 coupon to use on a later trip? It’s true. Merry holiday of your choice from Expedia.
Virgin America is having a huge 24-hour sale. Hurry! If you miss that there is still this: Virgin America is the first airline to offer fleetwide Wi-Fi and thanks to Google it’s free for the holidays! Read More »
Oct 10, 2009 13:00 - By: Aricq
As mentioned previously, we were on our way to do a whole lotta nothin’ in the town of Ojai, an hour or so outside of Los Angeles.
Before leaving, I had done a quick Google to see what it was known for and here’s a few that caught my eye:
From the cities main website, I discovered that they were making a big push for artists to help out renovating something in town – what it was escapes me now, but I liked that the lead story reached out to the right-brainers in town. Below that, however was a phone glitch affecting city hall’s runnings and that intrigued me even more – a $40,000 purse for whomever had the best eye for making the town better, but in the office of those who ran it, the voicemail wasn’t working properly. Read More »
Jul 20, 2008 9:46 - By: Patricia Jenkins
I attended the travel bloggers meet-up at Blogher on Friday afternoon. The travel meet-up was originally discussed by Pam Mandel at nerdseyeview and on Blogher. It was moderated by Suzanne Reisman at cussandotherrants (who has also written a new book, Off the Beaten Subway Track, more on that later) The majority of our time was spent on introductions, but we did have a few moments to discuss how we could create a more tightly-knit travel blogger community. Delicious Baby collected cards from everyone who is interested in building the community and will be posting the list of bloggers on her site. I captured a few names during the introductions and subsequent discussion of some great travel blogs I want to add to my google reader in addition to the blogs already listed:
ms.adventuresinitaly
perceptivetravelblog.com
Jet Set Girls Blogspot–all about girls getaways
See Jane Fly–for the female road warrior
Mommy Poppins–telling us how to get more out of NY
TasteFood
Headed to Margaritaville
everyday adventures
What A Trip written by Nancy Brown, a contributor to Uptake
Mile High Mamas–(the Denver Post)
KitchenGadgetGirl (and consultant to Uptake) has an idea for creating a page with RSS feeds from all the sites that wish to participate. I think this is the best idea yet, but I may be biased sine I have been working with her for nearly a year.
Uptake also have a travel blog search widget we created in cooperation with the t-list to make it easier to find travel bloggers everywhere. If you are interested in participating, please go here to join the search widget and here for information on the twitter t-list..
A few corporations sent some representatives including SeaWorld, DisneyWorld Orlando, Teleflora, and the Hilton were all there to gain insight into the travel blogger community. They want to reach travel bloggers of all kinds (see Blogher, travel is big business….)
Many of the bloggers were interested in building a more cohesive community and wanted to make ourselves more available to other bloggers, publicists and corporations trying to reach us. Please add to the conversation. Give us your ideas to build a more connected travel community. Next year, we hope Blogher ‘09 will have a panel devoted to travel.
Oct 17, 2007 8:52 - By: Gene McKenna
Well I wasn’t expecting this. I did a little satirical piece about what its like to do web design in the Google Era:
And it got quite a response at places like Sphinn, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and so on.
Like all new companies trying to attract consumers, the Kango team struggles with myriad challenges that at times seem a bit unrelated to our core mission of helping travelers take great vacations. Getting into the Google index and the indexes of Yahoo, Ask, MSN, etc is absolutely critical. It is how we will survive.
We know we will be offering great content to our users, which is the best long term strategy for success. But as a new site especially it’s hard to get the search engines to notice you quickly. So you have to do lots of things like asking all your friends to link to you and hiring SEO consultants to advise you. For every SEO consultant with advice there is another one with somewhat different advice around the corner. It’s amusing and can be frustrating trying to figure out what the magic formula is.
And it seems like much of the advice revolves on more links. Links, links links. You link to yourself so Google understands how you are structured and which pages you think are relevant and for what purpose. You need other people to link to you so Google thinks you’re important. You often have to link to other people in return. Once you get established and have a lot of people linking to you, it becomes easier because your links are worth more. Links, links, links – and not fancy Javascript links either.
The crazy thing is that it works. Google remains the place to be listed and the other search engines of course use the same model.
The challenging part for our rock-star design team is how to balance all the link requirements and still provide a great user experience. Sign up for our private beta program and we hope you’ll think we’ve only designed for a great user experience. Let us know.
- MeanGene
