Born on the Web

I’m an avid public transportation user: train, bus, tube, … The only thing I hate is waiting too long for a train to come, or missing a train because you were seconds late.

This could be solved by a simple location based service. (I’m not completely sure, but I think both Mobistar and Proximus are already providing these kind of services, correct?) When you come close to a train station, say like in a range of 200m / 600m (you should be able to adjust this yourself). The service detects you are nearing a train station and simply sends you a message with the schedule for trains going to your home station. So a 100% push medium, which is triggered by your location. I wouldn’t mind paying like 50 cents per message, because it adds value. It let’s me know if I need to start running or can go grab a bite before catching my train.

But since the nmbs (belgium railway company) doesn’t even provide a mobile site. I’m guessing it’s going to take a while before seeing this kind of services …

I talked about this before, but if the NMBS would open up it’s train schedule database, a whole new range of services can exist:

• more services for the people who travel with the train, you make their lifes easier
• an extra business model if you charge for commercial use of the web service
• build an ecosystem around the brand NMBS

Really, somebody should wake them up … we live in the year 2008, not 1998. Damnit !!

I've been a fan of "Lonely Planet" from the time I started traveling outside Europe. I once promised myself not to go on holiday without a Lonely Planet of the region. Because those small lettered books have the potential of making a holiday worth the money. It really made a difference on my trip to Thailand and South-Africa. It gives you something to work with, and certainty when everything else is failing, people who have used a Lonely Planet travel guide sure know what I mean.

But still there is something changing for me and I'm not sure why. For my recent trip to Zanzibar I still bought a Lonely Planet of Tanzania, but I found it a bit scarce on information on places to stay, so this time I mainly used Tripadvisor in looking for places to stay. The problem with Tripadvisor is that you can't get it in a handy paperback guide. So I checked out a few places that had more than 10 reviews, looked that they were overall positive, checked their rates and remember the place and name, wrote them on the back of my Lonely Planet.

So for some reason, I felt more secure and comfortable reading reviews from regular people than the Lonely Planet 3-4 lines reviews. And it seems the reviews from the writers of lonely planet aren't as objective as they originally stated. Which is logical, it is impossible for a traditional publisher to gather such amount of information and more important, keep that information up to date. We've seen the brittanica vs. wikipedia story, so I really think Lonely Planet should think about a more democratic way of maintaining their travel guides.

Tripadvisor isn't perfect either, too many advertisements and I find it impossible to understand why they never show the link to the homepage of the accommodation. The reviews are valuable but they should evolve more to a kind of wiki for each place to stay that is listed. People should be able to collaborate on a more generic description of the accommodation, and people who don't want to spend the time writing reviews, should just be able to mark descriptions as accurate or inaccurate.

Still I will keep using Lonely Planet guides, it remains a very valuable source, but they should use their avid travelers to keep the content up to date, to add new places to stay, that direct you to the hot spots of the moment. 

Since my internship in South-Africa a few years ago, I've fallen in love with the most beautiful continent in the world. I'm glad I'll be going back for two weeks in March, I'm really looking forward to it. I guess that's the reasons movies like this, give me the chills.

Can't wait to see the full movie...

(via)

I was browsing Flickr photos and came across an astonishing photostream. I was amazed by how many fantastic photos this guy had taken all over the world. I was not sure these pictures were all taken by just one person. So I messaged the user, this was what I got back:

Thanks Jesse. I did take all of the photos. I have been very fortunate to have been able to visit all of these amazing sights and events.

Check out his photostream, a beautiful mix of emotions and people.

Photos by Brad Hunters (watch it in full screen)

*mental note: should travel more, should learn how to make decent pictures.

Dear mister Telenet,

I really like that you've put hotspots all over the Belgium. Especially in the train stations this is really useful, but I was wondering: Shouldn't it be nice to have access when you're in the train on the rails?

So if the train stops in a railway station you just have the time to send and receive your mails. Now it only seems the station building is covered.

Thank you and do carry on wifi-ing the country,

Jesse

Because we're back in Belgium and have other obligations for a while. We're looking for people who are going to travel and want to blog it. You don't need to do it mobile, you don't have to do the geeky geotagging thing. But if you want a platform to dump your travel crap on, just mail me. For the people who already saw it, I integrated the map and cleaned the design, so it's now offically finished, a month late.

http://www.rationalgeocrapic.com

Nature Documentairy 2 ! (Again Dutch dialect)

It's been quiet lately over here. Well I'm in France for 2 weeks to get some thinking/writing for my masterthesis done. I'm on good old dial-up, so don't really have the time to do some posting. I'm working on my thesis and I have to say, without internet I really can get some writing done. I'm glad feed reading is not an option on dial-up. Now I realize how easy it is to get distracted from the things that really need to be done when you're constantly online. One of these days I'll be posting the structure for my thesis. I'm pretty happy with it but it just needs a little more time to sink in and review it. The weather is great over here (20° C) so it's great to relax and spend some time in nature, we actually made a little nature documentairy (it's in dutch - dialect ):

In my daily reddit check, I found a great article. The author wrote down the same thing I experienced in november 2004 when I was in South Africa. As often in SA we were in the middle of nowhere, just relaxin', fishing, watching animals, eating, ... We stayed a weekend at a hunting ranch in Rustewinter, about 50 km outside pretoria. No no, not for hunting, just for heaving fun. Closeby there was somekind of town, it was actually more a collection of a few shacks. A friend of us worked sometimes with the people that lived there. We went for a drink in the local "shebeen". A shebeen is nothing more then a small shack where they sell beer. There were like 20 people sitting outside in a circle, we just joined the circle and ordered a beer. I'll never forget you had to buy the beer in a 1 litre bottle, so we got drunk in no time. After my first bottle of "black label" under the afternoon sun, I felt already dizzy drunk but it felt great: I spotted almost only men in our cosy circle, there was one elder women. She was definatelly the village oldest and was constantly drunk as hell. She had a small plastic cup and everyone who opened a bottle needed to give her a sip. That was the courtesy of the shebeen. I still remember she was constantly talking to us in a very strange language we couldn't understand. But she seemed very friendly so I tried to talk to her, but I'm not sure she understood any word of my english. With the younger men we talked about a lot of things, we asked if they solded sigarettes and from the moment we said the word 'sigarettes'. We saw a man rushing away to the neighbour village to get us some sigarettes, about half an hour later we got our sigarettes! My friends called it the bush radio. Before we got our sigarettes, our shebeen friends helped us out with rolling some "tobacco" (?) in newspaper paper. I remember a big guy lighting the funny sigarette and passing it to us, it tasted like BBQ. I think we sat there the whole afternoon, just doing nothing besides drinking beer and it was so fun. I think it was one of the best experiences I had in SA. Just talking, making jokes and doing nothing ! I wish we had bars like that in Europe... Those people have almost nothing, no money, no tv, no cellphone, no work. They don't complain and keep smiling, they have beer and eachother, that helps them trough the day. I wouldn't like to be in there place, but if I was, I would do exactly the same... The article made me very nostalgic ...