Jonathan Peterson writes in response my request for some travel tips:

Check out virtualtourist, I used them a lot 2 years ago when we went to France. Very bloglike community with a lot of english content.

The navigation can be a bit confusing, as it mixes individual with commercial content. The best stuff is in people’s travelogues, off the beaten path and restaurant reviews.

It’s especially great when you get a local who has spent some time talking about their city

I’m amazed at how much more content there is than last time I looked. Viva la camera digita’l!

Yes, I’m a fan of VirtualTourist also.

Meanwhile, David Forrester of Molecular points to an article in NTK:

It’s always good to see a thriving new community springing up in Usenet’s barren wasteland – especially ones with interests as specific as those of “Richard Craft”, “Kevin Steward”, “Kyran Goring”, “Danny Farrell”, “Sean Rogers”, “Mike Harding”, “Oliver Hammond”, “James Goodman”, “Cameron Ellis” et al. Take it from us, these guys have a *lot* in common: they all post from a Mailbox Internet account, they all have Hotmail addresses, and the products they just can’t help recommending to each other include student info-hub thesite.org, the musical output of Elvis Costello and Afroman, plus the Activision games Wreckless, Rally Fusion and Minority Report. All of which, any idiot with a search engine can see, are clients of new media marketing agency DIGITAL OUTLOOK, who define guerrilla marketing as “participating within a variety of carefully targeted online communities […] and initiating ‘unofficial’ discussions about our clients’ offering”. They’ve yet to confirm or deny whether these individuals are Digital Outlook employees (or their aliases), and whether they have any kind of code of practice on the use of false identities for promotional purposes. Or maybe the company intranet was down, thus forcing the staff to communicate with each other via alt.internet.providers.uk.free? …

The only good news is that bastards like these do eventually get found out. But the technique undoubtedly still “works” in some instances since more people will be fooled than angered.

See you in Hell.

Categories: Uncategorized dw