CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-21 00:56:04 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Just tried accessing http://www.flickr.com/videos/

Not what I expected.

2013-05-21 00:43:17 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I've had enough of Google's cluttered search. New default search engine for me is now Yandex http://yandex.com/ 

This design is cleeeeeean and the results so far are excellent.

2013-05-03 00:01:50 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Clifton Hill Train Station:

Car parking - 90
Bicycle Racks: 11, Lockers: 6, Cage: No

What's wrong with this picture?

Here's what they should do:
* Sacrifice a handful of those car spots
* Add a LARGE bike cage that fits a hundred or more bikes
* Allow people to keep bikes at the station (for a nominal fee)

This would allow people from suburbs on Sth Morang/Hurstbridge line to leave cheap bikes at the station permanently. They can then catch the train to CH, and ride the bike from there to anywhere nearby. All the inner suburban stations should have this. At the very least the hub ones like Clifton Hill should.

Currently if you worked in Brunswick and lived in Eltham, you would have these options:
1. Drive
2. Catch train to Alphington or Clifton Hill, then a bus from there to Brunswick (25 mins plus wait time) and... more »

2013-05-02 06:12:35 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Now on the blog:

Freelance writer +Tim Richards talks tips on travel writing, packing light, and when not to drink coffee!

2013-04-30 03:50:22 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

This in a link submission checklist I just saw.

"Does your website promote gambling, pornography or Albania?"

Guess they had an Albanian spam problem :) 

2013-04-26 09:55:28 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

This is pretty amazing. It starts off with a fairly brutal puppy kidnapping, but stick with it, because it's rather interesting to see how these baboons have learnt to adopt dogs as pets.

2013-04-26 03:08:16 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I just hit the up-arrow randomly while watching a Youtube video and the spinner turned into a game of snake. Nice little easter-egg that!

2013-04-25 10:38:30 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Just some of the amazing things to be found in Thailand — this week's featured destination!

Read more in our blog: http://blog.travellerspoint.com/339/

Photo: Lub d Bangkok Silom http://bit.ly/17R68i0

2013-04-21 01:25:10 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Just got an email from Google notifying me of a new comment on a community post that was made some time ago. I decided I wanted to click through to the post, but the email doesn't seem to have any links to the actual post.

It has the following links
a) 2 links to the community (pointless since this post is months and months old)

and in the footer 
b) one link to the user profile
c) one link to the user profile of the person who made the post
d) a link to mute the user
e) a link to mute the post
f) a link to change what google sends me.

Seriously, no links to just go look at the post. WHY?!

Final conclusion: click link e to mute the post.  Then click undo to not mute it. 

2013-04-05 00:58:42 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

I wonder if someone at AAMI will get in trouble for RT'ing my pissed off comment to their main account..

  #socialmediafail  

2013-04-02 12:29:01 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 3 +1s)

Inspiring stuff

Source: http://imgur.com/gJ0TpZN

2013-03-30 12:08:10 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

Enjoyable Tumblr here... http://deshommesetdeschatons.tumblr.com/

Happy Easter everyone!

2013-03-26 11:47:29 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Exciting launch! Now you can share your current location on your Google+ profile. Like +Chris Hadfield is sharing his location from space.
His profile shows "Currently in the ISS passing over Turkey". Hover over the text to reveal the map. Considering the ISS is moving at ~17,247 miles an hour, you should see a new location every 30 seconds :)

To give the feature a try, just visit your Google+ settings via desktop or Android and turn on “Location Sharing.”
Learn more here: http://support.google.com/plus?p=plus_location

#googleplusupdate

2013-03-21 10:27:28 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

 

"There are two kinds of people, those who finish what they start and so on."

 - Robert Byrne

2013-03-21 03:00:53 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Interesting. Apparently Myki is doing a bit of creative calculations when it comes to their passes. Basically making a 38 day pass only valid for 37 days.

Quite a scandal if true.

2013-03-21 01:05:20 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

This is just too good :)

"I have always been a big proponent of following your heart and doing exactly what you want to do. It sounds so simple, right? But there are people who spend years—decades, even—trying to find a true sense of purpose for themselves. My advice? Just find the thing you enjoy doing more than anything else, your one true passion, and do it for the rest of your life on nights and weekends when you’re exhausted and cranky and just want to go to bed."

2013-03-20 11:05:12 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-03-19 04:54:11 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

Ireland is Travellerspoint's Destination of the Week

"breathtaking scenery, historic national monuments, strong Celtic traditions, a rich musical heritage, and increasing modern development"

http://blog.travellerspoint.com/332/

Photo by RJ222 (http://www.travellerspoint.com/users/RJ222/)

For lots of great Ireland content on G+ also see +Discover Ireland

2013-03-15 02:13:51 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Never fry gnocchi

2013-03-13 11:38:50 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Guessing this is not new, but I haven't seen it before. How do we go about getting our result in this position?!

2013-03-08 01:02:02 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

As some of you will know, there was a recent exodus from Wikitravel in which most of its members left the site and are now supporting a new Wikimedia backed site called Wikivoyage.

It's quite a battle. On the one hand we have Wikitravel with much more brand recognition and certainly far better rankings in Google.

On the other we have Wikivoyage with the backing of Wikipedia (and a buttload of links from there to go with it)

So how will these two fare? I decided to have a look at a snapshot of their Recent Changes to see what's going on. I looked at all the recent changes from the past day. First problem arose here.. Wikivoyage had more than 500 changes in the day, so it was impossible to show them all. To work around this, I took the earliest edit time and tracked changes from them. So I was comparing changes on the sites between 3.19 am and 00:00 on the 7th of... more »

2013-03-07 06:03:11 (12 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Loving the new G+ profiles. Just updated to my new epic profile pic ;)

2013-03-06 06:05:14 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

2013-03-06 05:58:17 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Vegetables. So versatile.

2013-03-06 03:42:11 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

Welcome to the future. 

2013-03-05 09:24:06 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

We've been putting up some new accommodation pages on Travellerspoint. This is the Lisbon one!

2013-03-04 05:38:43 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Anyone have a tip on how to get access to an unused (but previously used) username on Youtube? 

At some stage somebody registered the username "travellerspoint" making it unavailable to us. We have the trademark for this name. 

I thought maybe we did this at some stage, but when I went to get the password it showed two different email addresses as the options to resend and both of those were greyed out making it impossible to resend to them anyway. This makes me think the usenrame has in fact been banned from Youtube and should therefore be available to us again. 

Would love any advice.

2013-02-28 09:42:36 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

I'm pretty new to this, but on the weekend I went along to a nearby bonsai group's sale. I bought a few seedlings (japanese maple + 2 english elms) and a more advanced japanese black pine pre-bonsai grown from seed. Now, I understand black pines are probably a bit beyond my rookie stage, so am wondering what I should do with it at this point of its life?

Here are some photos of it from different angles. What I like about it is that it seems very healthy to me, has lots of low growth and some interesting roots (maybe not a perfect spread, but at least interesting and nicely offsetting the direction of the trunk). But it of course looks nothing like a bonsai yet. At the moment, that probably doesn't matter..

But should I be pinching it back regularly at this point? Should I pull off overly long needles at all? 

It's the last day of summer here in Melbourne.

2013-02-19 11:28:55 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

-62ºC seem cold enough? 

This guy certainly likes his adventures! :) 

2013-02-19 07:24:36 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

#Photography  LIKE. A. BOSS !!!

2013-02-18 06:56:32 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Lol!!

"I chase him. I bite him. Bad man. He tasty. Good boy. Good boy Peach"

2013-02-18 04:05:52 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

In the email today: 

"Dear abuse@travell---point.com,
Kindly find attached CV, hope to meet your requirements."

Wonder what type of work environment he'd be expecting.

2013-02-16 12:48:12 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

I wonder if econsultancy realises it's ranking #1 for "(not provided)"?

2013-02-16 07:53:50 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

Behold the Darvaza Gas Crater in Turkmenistan. This constantly burning crater has been around since at least 1971 when Soviets accidentally hit a cavern filled with natural gas while drilling. 

#Oopsie

Note to +Nik Kingsman  - not a meteorite impact site ;)

2013-02-15 03:36:15 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Our son's primary school has the following policy:

"Students from prep to year 3 must not ride bicycles, scooters or skateboards to school"

This irritates the hell out of me. What a great way to force all the parents to drive to school. Riding a bike is considerably faster than walking and considerably healthier than sitting in a car. Probably in many cases faster than driving too considering the parking issues.

This policy exists for supposed safety reasons. I guess they don't want kids bumping into each other or something along those lines.

Yeah, like all those cars driving around school are safe.

2013-02-15 02:10:47 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

This should stop the bicycles

2013-02-14 12:11:30 (11 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Well this sucks. Reddit won't accept your ad unless you have a US / Canadian / UK credit card.

Was looking forward to trying that too!

Grrr..

2013-02-13 08:06:55 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Should be on +Travel Massive Live in about an hour and a half discussing the always fun topic of monetizing travel.

That's assuming my train gets me home on time.

2013-02-13 05:58:53 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

"People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day."

- A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

2013-02-13 05:00:26 (10 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Our new travel planning tool is now live! 

* Keep all your bookmarks organised by which location they relate to
* Check transport options between stops (powered by +rome2rio)
* Collaborate with your travel companions
* View it all on a pretty map
* Quickly check exchange rates
* Track weather

And plenty more ideas in the works for this. But we need real users now to decide what to tackle next.

For more details or to try it out, head to: 
http://www.travellerspoint.com/planner/

2013-02-10 22:31:00 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Spotted this plant in a local nursery and am pretty enamoured with it. Problem, there's no label on it and the man working there on Sunday had no idea what it was. My guess is witch hazel which could be an interesting bonsai. Can anyone verify this from these photos?

Can't see it in the picture, but the nebari is already quite nice.

2013-02-07 11:10:55 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

So, who here is into bonsai? I've become obsessed of late.

2013-02-06 00:19:04 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Having a little look at how Wikimedia has integrated Wikivoyage into Wikipedia. I'd say they've botched it from an SEO point of view.

They replaced all the links to Wikitravel with links to Wikivoyage (bravo!)

But rather than linking to the actual Wikivoyage page they are linking to pages like this: 

http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Special:Search/Melbourne

That 302 (!) redirects to the Mebourne page. 

Not only that, but the anchor text seems a silly choice, only linking the word Melbourne when "Melbourne travel guide" would make total sense.

Could be waiting a while to see Wikivoyage ranking in Google with stupid decisions like this.

2013-02-05 11:11:37 (11 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I know Page rank doesn't matter that much in the scheme of things.

But here's a silly question - are there any PR10s left?

So far I've checked: google, wikipedia, apple, facebook, nytimes. All are PR9

I'm running out of candidates. See if you can find me one ;)

UPDATE: here's the list I've found so far, all 9 of them:

http://www.usa.gov/
http://get.adobe.com/reader/
http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
http://www.hhs.gov/
http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php
http://www.europeana.eu/portal/
http://www.universitas21.com/
https://twitter.com/
http://www.eua.be/Home.aspx

2013-02-05 09:14:05 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Trying to remove a connection in LinkedIn.. why is this SO hard?!

2013-02-04 09:57:45 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Good news, it's now legal for the ladies to wear pants in Paris.

2013-02-01 05:44:06 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 12 +1s)

Latest birthday cake effort -- I bet you can guess what the party theme was :-)

2013-02-01 04:34:35 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Hehehe :)

2013-01-23 03:10:19 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

New style of article going up on Travellerspoint with some area guides for accommodation. Thanks to +David Ways for writing this one on Lisbon :)

2013-01-16 00:36:32 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

An infographic I made (far out they are trickier to make than I thought) about why useful travel forums with a community are important. Something certain companies don't seem to realise anymore.