Yesterday I wrote at 7 new wonders: patriotism and business about the topic of election of the “7 new world wonders”, organised by a swiss firm with commercial reasons. While the first vote is free, any additional vote is not. Why would anyone vote more than once? In some countries big campaigns have been set to make internet users vote to, I suppose, leave the nation’s honor high.

Now, one of things I stated in that entry was that the election was organised by a private firm and not the UNESCO, that would be the institution that should validate this initiative in case it was actually relevant. But it turns out, that when reading the spanish newspaper El Pais I found this:

The swiss millionaire Bernard Weber organizes the contest, supported by the UNESCO an in which one can vote through e-mail, telephone and mobile messages.

The UNESCO supports the contest? I assumed the journalist Carmen Perez-Lanzac had access to information posted after my entry on the topic. So the first thing I did was go to official 7 new wonders site. And with the assumption that such information would be standing out in the site, since UNESCO’s support would be of enormous importance. And I found nothing; not only no mention about the subject in the homepage, but neither in the press news or any other sections. However, checking out the page dedicated to expert panel that participate in the event, I found out the president of the panel is Federico Mayor, an spanish citizen who was general director of UNESCO. But he participates in the contest as an individual an not in representation of the organisation, as the Wikipedia states.

I went to the UNESCO site. I checked the press official news with several search. I found nothing. Unfortunately, the note at the spanish newspaper El Pais has no links to any site where the UNESCO’s support to the contest appears, and I take for granted that the journalist checked that info before publishing. But at least with the public information that is in the Net, I haven’t been able to verify that affirmation. Now, I don’t know what to think. That a commercial initiative is presented as something supported by an international institution such as the UNESCO is something serious, and deserves attention.

If anyone has more information to clear our doubts, it would be really good .

A few months ago, many media started promoting a contest about the “New 7 wonders of the world“. Such task is not being carried ahead by the UNESCO or any other relevant global organisation, but by a private company that charges for every additional vote for a “new wonder” -the first one is free when issued on the web, but you’ll have to pay if you want to do it through SMS. The worst thing is that several countries have launched strong campaigns to promote the vote for its country’s “wonders”. That is, their citizen, in the name of national pride, have to increase the profits of a private company that is making business of a contest of argueable seriousness.

At Viaje Aqui, carioca Ricardo Freire says something quite interesting:

It’s an insult to intelligence to place Machu Picchu, Angkor, Isla de Pascua Islands, the Coliseum, the China Wall, Egypt’s and Chichen Itza’s pyramids next to the Liberty Statue, the Corcovado Christ and the Cinderella Castle in Baviera. Excuse me? Cinderella’s Castle?

An acclaration, just in case, the castle is in fact called Neuschwanstein, and Disney based in it to make Cinderella’s.

Tony Galvez’ blog de Viaje a Brasil also talks about the 7 new wonders of the world topic.

It’s not worth spending money in this. It’s not even recognized by an important organisation, so don’t waste your time and money in these things. The real sad thing is that there are governments that are taking this seriously, and spending public funds in promoting something that has no real value, like being recognized by UNESCO.

UPDATE: the egyptian government complays about the lack of seriousness of the contest, which they consider of poor scientific value. More at this link (spanish).

Costa Rica is one of the most important touristic destinations in Latin America. The country is the most stable in its region and has always shown an important economic development. The section dedicated to this country by the Indigo Guide online guide tries to summarize the most important issues when visiting this nation: history, basic information about the population and its quality of life, weather conditions, air flights, plus sections about specific topics. There are special sections for the gay scene, the possibility to learn spanish, and plastic surgery -this last item being on high demand among US tourists, since medical costs in Costa Rica are much lower.

Destinations are divided in Central Pacific, North Pacific, South Pacific and the Caribbean. The information on every destination is quite basic and is limited mostly to specific info on geography, history and landscapes. Unfortunately, there are no pictures for us to appreciate the beauty of each location. It would also be important to get more useful information for the traveler, such as the availability of hotels in every place, including its prices; tours that can be done around the area; and places to eat and go out to. While the section dedicated to Costa Rica includes a section dedicated to tours and adventure tourism, these references are too general, so we have to do a further research in other sites. If traveling is basically an experience, a travel site should help us build and plan this experience. And in this sense, Costa Rica Indigo Guide falls a little short.

This entry is sponsored by Review Me.

TripHub is a quite easy to use group travel organizer. The idea is to provide a series of tools to plan a travel among several people and to coordinate different details: time schedules, flight numbers, hotels, etc. Although the site is in english -obviously aiming at the american market mainly- it’s accesible to anyone who has a minimal knowledge of this language.

Besides the coordination tools, each group travel has an assigned blog to publish stories. What’s missing, at least in the current version, is a photo album or something similar. The contents upload interface is too basic, by the way. The information can be shared among the group members; for this, we can invite other people through emails.

As part of its business model, TripHub can allow us to search for flights and hotels; these transactions must be on commision. Besides, these pages have Google Adsense advertising.

While for now it’s pretty basic, TripHub fulfills its assignment. Surely it’ll have to add new functions if it wants to survive the competition of Yahoo! Trip Planner.

More than a year ago, I published an entry dedicated to Flickr groups that had travel and tourism photos as a central topic. It’s been a while ago, specially in the fast paced Internet, and it’s time to update this list. If you have any suggestion about Flickr groups that are not listed here, leave them on the comments. Before I forget: soon there’ll be news about this blog’s Flickr group, as a way to build a travel photography group and be able to discuss them in spanish -besides, of course, to establish a new difussion channel for the travellers’ work.

Travel Photography: with more than 5 thousands participants, the travel photo group is close to the 100 thousands published pictures. To explore the group is a long hours task, but I guarantee you’ll find excellent pictures.

Lonely Planet Bluelist: a group of travel pictures that comes from the publication of Bluelist, edited by Lonely Planet, which selects the best travel experiences. It’s relatively new, but it already has more than 500 members and 1500 photos. Only one picture per day can be published.

Travel Portraits: pictures of people we’ve found in our trips. Almost a thousand photos, more than 120 members.

Public Transportation: about public transportation means in several places in the world. 170 members, over one thousand photos.

Globetrekkers: with more than 720 members, they’re close to 14 thousands pictures of many places in the world.

Road Trip America: road pictures of the USA.

Visit the world: another travel photo group, with almost 100 thousands images.

Travel Pix: another large group of travel photographs, with over 40 thousands images.

Travellers and Landmarks: general topic travel pictures.

South America: South America pictures. The group is mostly in english, but the fact that it has about 10 tohusands pictures about our region makes it very attractive.

Passport Stamps and Visas: this is one of my favorites. It simply is about pictures of stamps that embellish your passport. Frankly, in some cases the number of stamps is remarkable. OBviously, you’ll feel pretty envious when looking at those passports.

Trenes: in spanish, a group dedicated to trains, with over 40 members and 200 published pictures. Your contributions are welcome.

Trains and Trolleys: obviously, photos of trains and trolleys.

Aeroplane in flight: pictures taken on flight. I’m sure we all have one of this kind.

Route 66: The Mother Road, the most famous route in the USA.

City Sunsets: while this is not a group specifically dedicated to tourism, the idea to photograph sunsets in various cities can’t help to be attractive to a traveller. It’s quite popular: 522 members and almost 1400 photos.

Motels: potentially an interesting project, which has grown a lot in this last year, and has over 200 participants.

By the way, even when Flickr is actually a quite good publishing platform, it still lacks some important tools when building groups. For example, a tool to filter images by popularity, or the number of people that have marked it as a favorite. They’ve added some functions in the groups; such as the possibility to limit the number of pictures that a member can publish by day. But it’s time to add new ones, if Flickr doens’t want to be left behind.

It’s not unusual to find articles, particularly journalistic articles, with “common sense” affirmations which tend to confront “real” vs “virtual”. If a person spends a certain number of hours in the Internet, some apocaliptic voices will say they “don’t have a real life” -apply this to any other thing related to the Net: keep a blog, chat, navigate, whatever. The idea is simple: the “virtual” character of the Internet opposes to the “real” side of our everyday “offline” life.

But such opposition is not quite productive. If we look closely, we’ll see that a good part of Net users are mainly interested in taking better advantage of certain “real world” life experiences. And the travel market is clearly an example of this. As we’ve been observing for more than five years now, the Internet is crucially modifying the way consumers experience the travel market, they make reservations, search for information and contact other travellers before leaving home. The vast aboundance of online resources has greater interest in providing users ways to improve their travel experiences. Thus, it’s even easier to find and make a hotel reservation online; or talk to other users about certain destinations, to avoid falling into openly publicitary articles or texts; or narrate our own travel experiences in our sites, blogs or phorums.

What use would it have in this moment in history to state an opposition between “real” and “virtual” in the travel market on the Internet? If we take into consideration the growing number of Internet users, and the number of travellers moving around the world, we’ll see that in the last years these numbers have grown. We could hypothesize about how both forces potentiate themselves; more Internet users means more travellers used to build their travel with information taken from the Net. Facing this, of course, the traditional media will have to start reconsidering the way they get to their readers, who don’t want to know anything about “impressive landscapes” or nonsense like that, but who would rather have information and advices to build their own travel experiences.

And a good part of Internet uses for the travel market is still unexploited. We’ll see what happens when ratings systems for destinations, hotels and bars are generalized, and when smarter search and comparation (of flight tickets, hotel rooms, etc.) tools appear.

What kind of use do you make of the Internet when planning a trip? I’m interested in knowing my readers’ opinion, to know what kind of Web tools they’ve been using to build their trips. Because there’s always someone who’s found some new and original use. Do you use online communities to relate to other travellers? Do you always make a hotel reservation online? Have you had any bad Web-based reservations experiences? Leave you opinion in the comments area.

A few days ago, I said I was using Google Notebook to build a weekly summary of selected entries on different blogs about travel (spanish only). And I came up with and idea: to build a series of entries dedicated to Internet tools that can be useful to travellers; for example, to collect and publish information. I have no idea how regularly will I publish this section, but I already have in mind some more applications to check.

Not let’s go to Google Notebook. Basically, it’s a plugin for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox navigators. The idea is to work as some sort of clips collector. But at the same time, it’s an interesting application for those who want to collect information for future trips. To use it, you just need to download the plugin and have a Google account, for example, the one you use to access Gmail. Once installed, you have to restart the navigator.

Let’s suppose we want to save information about an specific destination. For this example, I’ll use Tomas Jofre, a town in the province of Buenos Aires, that stands out for its parrillas and restaurants. For this, first, we open the notebook -you’ll see it in the bottom bar of the navigator- and create a new folder, let’s call it “Tomas Jofre”. Then we start to navigate in Google and find a note in La Nacion newspaper which talks about this destination.

We decide we’d like to save the full text of the note. For this, we select the entire material we wish to save, and right click, and in the context menu we choose “Note This” to add it to our page.

We’ll keep adding the texts we find, and they’ll all be stored in the same page, as you can see in this example.

While it’s an useful service, one we can use to make “clips” in the useful pages we visit, Google Notebook has some not so positive things. The first one is that it doesn’t allow collaboration among users. That is, it’s not possible, at least for now, to have many people interact to create only one page. The other thing is that you have to be careful to keep the folder where we want to send the clip, open; otherwise, we’ll have to do the whole thing over.

This Google service can be a good way to collect information and share it with other users. If you have pages created in Google Notebook about travel, you can leave your contribution in the comments area.

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.

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.

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.