We’ve written a lot in this blog about touristic marketing and how destinations tend to emphasize their “differential qualities” when presenting themselves to the travel market. Surely, most of marketing conceptualizations, for their ambition, circle around the idea of “country brand”. It’s about presenting a whole country from a series of particular attributes. In Argentina, at least, this process is old, and next week the plan of coutry brand that will be used for the travel market will be made public. The issue is not simple, as a recently published The New York Times note states. At least some country brands I’ve seen around tend to remark certain too general qualities and then work other differentiative attributes with each destination.

Brazil’s country brand idea is to enhace its diversity through the use of colors. This “diversity” is associated to joy and peace, since if there’s something the touristic market hates is conflict. I know what you’re thinking: Brazil’s diversity is far from not having conflictive issues, as in anywhere else in the world. But, let’s not focus on the political view, at least this once, and let’s go to another interesting topic: the use of the brazilian country brand in graphic publicity. At least here in Buenos Aires they wallpapered half of the city with promotions of their destinations. And here’s an issue: the first times I saw it, I didn’t quite understand what were the painted faces about. First, I thought it had something to do with soccer; then, I noticed the colors matched the flags of the people in the ads. Several days later, I realized it was the touristic logo of Brazil painted on the faces…

I wonder how many people took as long as I did to realize this detail -and how many still don’t understand this ads…

More about the topic of Brazil’s country brand can be found in this country’s official tourism site.

A couple of months ago, many people kissed Technorati -one of the most stable references in the always changing blogosphere- good bye. There were plenty reasons for this: it was too slow, had many errors and didn’t always updated in the right way. With the appearing of Google Blog Search, more than one rushed to nail the coffin. A couple of months later, no one talks about Google Blog Search, and Technorati has sensibly improved its perfomance. It still makes some mistakes now, but less frequently than before; and, what’s best, it’s starging to add new services. For now, the section called Technorati Kitchen only has Explorer, a news presentation inspired in Memeorandum, and for which it uses tags that classify blogs and its articles. Facing this types of services, it becomes quite relevant the fact that we’ve tagged not only the articles we publish but also our sites. If you’ve signed in Technorati, you have to go this address. Let’s see if Technorati Kitchen produces new initiatives ahead. But for now it seems to be the place is not as dead as many assumed, better yet, it’s still quite useful.

Have you noticed that those who define themselves as travellers keep placing things to differentiate themselves from tourists, while tourists don’t even care for whatever travellers do?

For a long time, we’ve been used to a one direction type of information. The media presented articles, we read them and, at most, we could send a letter if we had any question. Interaction didn’t go beyond that. But in blogs, which usually allow comments, the situation is quite different.

Let’s take a note about some european destination, for example. The journalist made some previous research, travelled, told what he’d seen, and period. How he got there, is not part of the note; that is, certain production conditions were erased from the final text. If he’d gone there as part of his vacations, or if he was invited by some country’s tourism office or travel agency, that’s something we don’t see printed. In a way, that became part of the backstage, part of the note’s making of process readers didn’t have to know about.

With the arrival of blogs and comments spaces, these things have begun to change. If I wrote some entries dedicated to some european destination -hopefully soon, let me dream a little- good part of my reader’s questions would be, precisely, about that backstage. How much did the ticket cost, how did I find out, what guides and Internet sites I consulted, how to prepare for the trip, how much for the lodging, where did I stay…

If my answer was “I was invited by a travel agency, and I spent my time from tour to tour, all paid, and I have no clue about how much these things cost” -since, of course, I didn’t have to pay for them or even care about organising my trip- my experience of the place will lose sense for my readers.

Since I didn’t have to plan the trip as any other person has to, I’ll be unable to answer most of the commentators questions.

And here’s an interesting distance between graphic journalism, which doesn’t allow direct interaction with readers, and blogs which allow comments. The travel experience of the travel journalist who has someone else plan the trip for him, is not too interesting for the reader who wants to know more information to plan his own trip. And this is part of the process we’ll all have to learn: we are not able to provide answers to all questions, and without our readers help we wouldn’t be able to handle everything.

In the future, the most interesting travel stories will be those produced by our equals, other Net users. Like it or not, journalists and the tourism industry will have to get used to it. Because the travel experience is not only about experiencing the place; planning the trip itself is part of our questions and doubts.

Let’s continue with the video series of non touristic areas of Buenos Aires. After such a good reception of the videos dedicated to the Premetro -they had over 200 views in two weeks- this time its turn of Parque Chacabuco, the area I’ve lived in for the past three years. It’s a view of the zone from the roof of my building; besides the park, you can see the surrounding districts of Bajo Flores, Caballito and Boedo. Since the day was very bright and nice, you’ll notice a few people walking in the park. There are two videos; the first one is the longest, and includes my walking tour around the building’s roof. The second one, shorter, is only focused on the view of the Parque Chacabuco. Again, the videos are hosted at my DailyMotion account.

Everytime someone talks about Greasemonkey, there’s always the issue of security. But there’s also another difficulty, this time on the user’s side: every time you update GM, most of the scripts stop working -and this also happens when we update Firefox. The problem is, of course, that we’ve gotten used to using some of these scripts and now we’re forced to change certain processes. For example, in my case, I used the Bloglines and Del.Icio.Us integration tool developed by Persistent Info. I also found useful some scripts for Google, such as Butler which gave me direct access to other search engines. Something quite interesting -particularly in the search for images. At least from the plugins side, Firefox has solved the issue of updates. Isn’t it time that Greasemonkey scripts follow this path of automatic update? Although, I’m already listening to complaints that alert us about the huge insecurity that the automatization of uploads would bring.

After so much going back and forth, I’ll finally join the massive fled from Buenos Aires that takes places every january. This time, the destination will finally be the south of Brazil. Not too original. Year after year, thousands of argentineans vacation in that area of the world, even when the dollar exchange rate is not in our favor. We have 15 days to walk around during the last week of january and the the first of february, and for now we know we’ll be in:

Porto Alegre (there are social reason here, I know it’s not a very touristic destination)
Rio de Janeiro
Florianopolis (we haven’t decided yet what place of the island we’ll be staying at)
Curitiba, Paranagua and Ilha do Mel

As you can see, it’s quite an ambitious tour for two weeks, considering part of the route will be done by ground.

We’ve been looking at other locations such as Praia do Rosa, Bombinhas and Camboriu, but I still don’t know if we’ll have enough time to see all of these places.

I’ve been doing some research about these destinations, I’ve even been drawing maps, as I usually do. Any kind of advice about the destinations cited above will be welcomed and appretiated, particularly about where to go, places to stay and prices, in case of people who has recently visited this area of the world.

Some of this trip’s objectives are:

To make the trip from Curitiba to Paranagua by train. I have different information about this issue. On one side, I have a brochure from last year of this train and it says that it works everyday during high season. But the train’s website says it only works during weekends. Has anyone taken this train on january or february?

To see Rio de Janeiro. Yes, it was about time. And the tour would include a visit to Petropolis. Has anyone been there? Is it worth visiting?

To see Ilha do Mel. In this case, the doubt is about lodging, since it seems quite complicated during high season. Does anyone have any info about this island?

To walk around Florianopolis island. I’m not fond of laying on the beach for too long; if I don’t move around a little, I get bored easily.

Surely during the following weeks I’ll tell more things about the 2006 tour, as I find out more info. Feel free to use the comments area to share any useful information or advice about these destinations -including Praia do Rosa and Bombinhas, as possibilities.

Doc Searls stated not long ago in an article, that “identity without anonimity is like mathematics without the zero”. And in Internet math, the matter of “being anonymous” has always been a part of the possibilities of expression. We all know that, in the end, no one is an anonymous being in the Internet; that if someone has the means to it, he could track you down easily -IPs are stored in any server that routes our connection. Of course, there are ways to make this tracking harder, but they’re not perfect.

Why is anonimity part of the expression rules of the Internet? Because in many cases, it’s impossible to declare politic opinions without suffering the consequences of it. There’s a huge number of countries all over the world that obsessively control what their citizens declare, and exert a direct censorship over those who cross the line. Anonimity is here one condition to the appearing of disagreements in a frame that guarantees the possibility to express opinion without being sanctioned for it.

Of course, there’s also a darker side; for example, the use of anonimity in the Internet to insult or vandalize contents, as it happens at wikis. But those are the risks of a mean that doesn’t tolerate the strict forms of contents regulation like the ones television or radio has.

The recent changes in Wikipedia show again this tension between anonimity and the possibilities to build knowledge. Should we let anyone modify the contents or should we at least force them to register to create new articles? By going for the second option, we’d be enforcing the “need” of limiting -at least a little- the possibilities of the users anonimity to contribute to the Wikipedia -although, those who wished to add text to an existing article could still do it like the have until now.

Opening spaces of participation in the Net implies not only to obtain its benefits -that our readers help us build better contents- but also its negative parts -perjurious or vandalic attacks. In many cases, certain criteria ends up operating by restricting certain possibilities of expression, but also imposing certain controls based on common sense. In my case, I think one of the things that someone who has opened a space of participation in the Net, like a phorum or a blog, has to take care of is to proved a space of participation that supports the discussion of ideas. If our best readers don’t feel encouraged to participate because every idea they express is brutally attacked by some troll, we’re doing very little to take care of that space.

Besides the fact that trolls are part of the Net’s floklore back from the newsgroups times, the important thing is to encourage the discussion of ideas, or provide a platform for that.

The internet usually is a sort of bitter place on this; there’s always someone who, instead of focusing on the arguments, attacks the messenger -an old retoric trap- or someone who just insults around. Much before blogs, there already were labels when managing discussions on mail lists and newsgroups, such as the famous “off topic”. That is: the one who went out the discussion topic was sanctioned. If he wanted to talk about something else, he could open a new line and period. Not to mention the role of phorum and mailing lists moderators; there was always someone watching for certain rules to be respected. In the end, it’s almost a common sense decision: “I don’t like censorship, but something has to be done in order to prevent this space to become a insult board”. Or to prevent the contents from be vandalized or openly manipulated, such is the case of Wikipedia.

So much for Web 2.0, but we end up discussing the same topics furiously debated in newsgroups and phorums in the early 90’s. And the worst thing is that it seems like we’re going backwards in the debate level of the topic.

Slowly, audio files that can be downloaded from the Internet -generically called podcasts- are making its way to the travels market. The english travel agency Thompson, for instance, offers podcasts for more than ten destinations, among them, Mexico and Egypt. A few weeks ago, we talked about the Lonely Planet Travelcasts. And the last three available are about Dublin, Bolivia and the South of Asia. About this topic, the travels editor Cath Urquhart has published an opinion column at Times Online, where she evaluates the possibilites of podcasts as an informative tool for our trips. Urquhart is interested in rebating all that story about the “death of travel guides” which would take place as soon as the use of audio files extended. I agree with her. We’ve heard this story before. For example, with the growth of the Internet, I’ve heard more than one say “why am I going to buy a guide for, if everything’s on the net?”. Unfortunately, that’s not true. The amount of information we can get on the Internet is huge, but completely disperse and unsystematized. Guides are, precisely, of great value not so much for the originality of the information, but for the fact that it’s clearly organised and structured. Of course, such organisation can be argued from many points of view, even political, but that’s another issue. But that the information is hierarchized is really important when you travel and have little time to search for info.

Now, well, what possibilities do podcasts have in the travels area? To begin with, I believe they can have excellent aplications in established tours, where they can function just like the audio guides delivered at some museums. In this way, they help to focus the traveller’s attention in some points. Another advantage: the tourist can take the audio file in his mp3 player and listen to it during air flights or long bus rides, and access to new information.

By the way, Jennie German-Molz also talks about this topic in her blog. And, in spanish, Viajes a tu aire has made several podcasts about destinations like Cuba and New York.

The Buenos Aires Premetro goes by a not touristic at all area located in Villa Soldati. Since I take this path every once in a while, I filmed two small videos of what you see from the Premetro’s window. It’s a form, let’s put it this way, to show you a part of the city that usually doesn’t appear in documentaries or brochures. I uploaded them to my DailyMotion account, an excellent service of video publication. To watch them, just clic on the play sign; if you have broad band, it should start almost right away. If you have dial-up connection, be a little patient. The videos were made with a Canon SD100 digital camera, so don’t expect the greatest definition .