From zero to 100 million......

After 10 Years of Blogs, the Future's Brighter Than Ever
Wired reports and I'm sure few knew who first coined the phrase "weblog".
Well here he is. Jorn Barger



And according to the comments section another fellow claims to have started blogging from Japan in '96.

We sure have come a long way since then and the landscape of communications has changed significantly and will continue to change as social media will become even more mainstream and the percentage of contributors rather than readers increases.

Blogged with Flock

The Machine is U

this video is a great description and visualization of the web today and how it will develop beyond 2.0 by adding intelligence

Embedded Video

Hat tip to Stephen Joyce for bringing it to my attention.

Check this out, pretty useful stuff.

found this about The website marketing mind map on Hotelmarketing.com It sums up web based marketing in a visual and effective way.

 

A brilliant video on bubble 2.0

or, will it be different this time around?

Here Comes Another Bubble - The Richter Scales

hat's off to Fake Steve Jobs for the tip

Talk about relevant messaging!

and who can express it more succinctly than the Brits: SatLav scheme takes the piss out of Westminster as reported here by Absolute Gadget.

And fear not Americans, as synchronicity would have it, a similar service is being announced in several North American cities today -- including Atlanta, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Oakland, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington D.C. The new service is called MizPee (www.mizpee .com) from Yojo Mobile (www.yojomobile.com).

Who will ever doubt again the utility of the web for all of us in one of life's most dire situations.....!

 

The Next Big Thing: User-Contributed Metadata

is the title of a great post on the Minding the Planet blog about new developments that will have a significant impact on how we experience and use the web.

It will be exciting to follow sites such as Twine when fully rolled out and how they will take what we today loosely call user generated content to a whole new level by adding richer data elements and semantics.

I expect this to have an impact on travel as well and bring improvements to today's user experience of travel sites. In light of the reported decrease in the number of online travelers a welcome and needed next step in the evolution of the market.

 

Travolution Blog: Travolution Autumn Conference

Can meta search move beyond flights and price? raises a valid question.

Ever since the start of online travel the focus has always been on the lowest price. This was reinforced by most media stories and became the mantra, much to the detriment of online travel agencies, who after all are intermediaries, and need to make profit to survive.

With the introduction of meta search that focus became even stronger, with added transparency making price comparison total.

Paul Furner is right that there needs to be more than price in the equation as otherwise all travel risks to be commoditized even further, as has largely happened with airplane seats, not the least due to their dominant share in the overall online travel market.

What's disappointing, is that many travelers seem to no longer realize that in travel - as any other product or service - you get what you pay for!

The sooner the developments now starting to be seen on the semantic - or intelligent - web become available for use in travel the better. This type of enhanced data will very likely make meta search better and develop in the direction of adding more evaluation criteria than price.