Thing 33 -- Travel 2.0

Generally, the Internet and its various tools has had an effect of leveling the playing field, taking the expertise to the average person. On the other hand, someone like my mother, who has no computer and vehemently doesn’t want one (she’s 80, she deserves a break…), is at a significant disadvantage. Without help, she would end up overcharged and out of the loop in any travel should she try to plan on her own. But I suspect the group of people she is in is smaller than those who are willing to research things on their own or with a librarian’s help.

I also had an experience with the prevalence of Travel 2.0 after my vacation last summer. I had posted some photos on Flickr to share with friends (thanks to the original 23 Things) and got an unsolicited email from an organization that puts together Travel mashups that wanted use one of our photos as part of their site. Since my son took the picture, I gave him the credit. Here's the photo.

Now on the the specifics for this entry.

ARTICLES -- Grossman’s article on Travel 2.0 makes some good points. Right now, I suspect that companies are becoming even more customer-service friendly in order to try to stay in business.

TRAVEL BLOGS AND PODCASTS -- The Window Seat didn’t do much for me. It didn’t have almost anything on the one location that my constituents might be interested in—Israel. The entries seem bland and not particularly helpful. Travel 2.0 Blog also had no tags relating to Israel.

The Lost Girls was entertaining, and if one wanted to go to those particular spots, the entries could be useful.

So rather than keep whining about what I didn’t find on what you listed, I went and searched for myself. Here are few that I found:


Real Travel -- Israel This general website, Real Travel, has a section on the Middle East generally and Israel in particular. It collects entries from people’s blogs about the place and allows you to sort by most popular and most recent. I found the entries thoughtful and potentially useful; they also included numerous photos. It also had links about hotels, restaurants, travel planning, etc.

Travel Blog -- Jerusalem This site is less well organized and harder to figure out how to use. It focuses on current material and doesn’t allow an easy was to sort it.

REVIEW SITES – I first looked at Trip Advisor and found it pretty good. I like that it includes so much, but it didn’t have an easy way to focus in on a particular area. I chose to look at Chicago, since I lived there during college. But the site had no feature (that I could find, at least) that would allow me to narrow to a particular area within the city. I came closest when I searched on something in that area, such as the U of Chicago, which then let me see specifics in that neighborhood. But it didn’t list neighborhoods by name, which would have been nice.

IgoUgo feels like a cleaner, less distractingly busy site. However, it suffers from the problem above, but even more so. When I tried to get neighborhood specific information, I only got various people’s blog type entries. No map, no sites, nothing else.

So my assessment is that these sites are good if you have a car and are willing to drive all over the place, or if you just want to focus on the downtown areas of a city, but are less useful if you want neighborhood specifics. Still, they are a good place to start.

TRAVEL JOURNAL SITES – I went to Vcarious first, and read someone’s journal about travelling to Scotland and the Isle of Skye, since that is a trip I would like to take. I found the entry enjoyable, although I don’t know how much I would trust something like this to help me plan my journeys.

Mapness looks as if it could be interesting, but the one site that came up when I searched Jerusalem appeared to be tracing the travels of someone from the 1300s. Not surprisingly, there was no video posted… I could see this one being fun to do, if not as much to read. But it didn’t have much there at this point.

TRAVEL MASHUPS – Hotspotr would have been a help to one of my friends in the last week, who ended up paying $7 for an hour of internet at her hotel because she couldn’t find any cafés with free wi-fi.

The Travel Mashup awards site was fun. I liked one that had nothing to do with this Thing, called Portwiture, which finds photos on Flickr based on what you post on Twitter about. A lot of fun. I’ve posted mine in this thing.

Woozor was allowed me to get a ten day forecast for the UK, which could be handy if one were planning that trip to Scotland that I discussed above.

I don't think these sites would be of much professional use for me, since I work at a K through 8 School. However, I might use some of them for my own travels.

Thing 32-- GoogleMaps and Mashups continued

Well, the link is a better choice because you can actually see all of the photos I bothered to put in. But I am going to leave in the html one too, just for the visual effect.

Thing 32 -- Google Maps and Mashups

This map traces the walks I did from my childhood home to the schools that I attended. I found photos of each spot on the street level Google maps as well, and put them at each site. It was frustrating because the map kept speeding away from me--reason unknown. It was relatively easy to do the bits and pieces with practice, although I am unclear how effective the map will be in the blog. Each time I tried to paste the html directly into the post, it crashed Internet explorer. (Yes, I know other browsers are friendlier, but I share this computer with my family.) I tried doing it as a gadget, but realized that wouldn't be directly in the post. So I am trying this way (pasted into the post) and we will see what happens. Other frustrations--the descriptions of spots must shift into html, and apostrophes left odd code. So I went back and rewrote to avoid the odd characters popping in. Just in case there are issues with the map, I made the title a hot link to the Google Map site as well.

I think these mashups could be quite useful if you were doing a scavenger hunt, a walking tour or a family gathering. But I really don't see much practical application for me at work. Still, you never know. I'm using other stuff I didn't think I would need either. Isn't that the point of this program? :-)


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Thing 31 -- More Twitter

I personalized my Twitter page by adding my real photo, putting in a personal vacation photo as part of my background, and giving a sense of who I am in my description. I have done mostly observational tweets, with a few urls tossed in. I even got to explain what MToaS was when I abbreviated it. I also am experimenting with using it to get people to read my poetry at las4poems.wordpress.com in a bit of what the car talk guys call “shameless self-promotion.”


I have added a bunch of tweeple who focus on books and technology to follow. I am at best lukewarm about all of the social media sites. I don’t honestly have time to spend looking at all of this stuff. I am happiest getting material in my Reader feeds and judging for myself whether or not the material is interesting or useful. On the other hand, I do feel like if I had a pressing question that needed a quick answer, Twitter would be a great place to go. Right now I am still trying assess what if anything I will use it for. I also added my Senator’s office and the Dalai Lama, because I can.


I usually use the TwitterGadget for iGoogle to view and post to Twitter, because I use iGoogle for my homepage at work. When I am at home, or if I want to do something more extensive, I just go to the Twitter site on my computer. I’m not big on downloading a ton of stuff at work or home, so this seemed like the best choice. Because I already had added a Twitter Feed on my 23 things blog, I added a Twitstamp badge to my poetry blog, just to see if I could. And again, I discovered how much less intuitive Wordpress is than Blogger for adding gadgets. I managed to figure it out, but it took much longer.


I added the Tweet Value rating and Twitter Grading rating to this blog. I will probably remove the value one after a while, because it seems pretty silly to me. For the Grading, I opted for the number of followers, because that seemed a reasonable statistic. I also went to the status generator site, which is amusing, although I didn’t actually post any of its suggestions. Here is a screenshot of my favorite one.






I added my name in two places to the Tweeter directory—both as a librarian and as a writer. I found more useful people to follow in the blog post of freetech4teachers.com which included people posting about technology tools in education.


I’m trying Twilert for looking for school library information and middle school language arts materials. I’ll see how it works for a while and post when I have a better sense.


According to the Next Web definitions, I am somewhere around a 3 or 4. I find the quantity of stuff people are posting amazing. I can’t figure out how they get any other work done. And I still don’t love being this linked to a machine. Ok, now I was complaining when the DSL at work went out and we were without computers for most of a day. I couldn’t process books, I couldn’t help teachers find lesson materials, etc. But I did get books shelved, library lessons planned out for the next 5 weeks, and a whole lot of reading of professional materials read. But I do occasionally like to feel fresh air on my face too. And no, I wouldn’t twitter on a cell phone either when walking.


Twitter can be an amazing, real-time tool, but one that often gets overwhelmed by goofiness. One of my friends said that it was just like Facebook status lines, but shared with the whole world. And for most people that is what it is. As seen in Doonesbury comics lately…