Category Archives: oregon

Thanks CheapSeats!

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Is started with a frustrating 45 minute session at cheapseats.com where they kept saying my itinerary choice, presented to me 30 seconds before was NOT available.   I ran through this process 3 times but then dutifully followed their instructions and the guy got me the same price and flights.  I don't expect perfection, just consistency with the advertised price and they delivered on it.    The price at $426 from MEDFORD to BOSTON was about $150 less than Delta's own site so I'm happy.

Since I publish a lot of travel information and also run several affiliation deals with TravelNOW, ONETIME, Hotels.com, and many others, people always ask me how to get the best airline and hotel prices.  

The answer is simple but disappointing – you generally need to surf around a LOT and hope to bump into the place that happens to have the best deal of the moment.  

For Airline tix I usually begin with Orbitz (use the matrix feature with 3 days "before and after" for a nice price "map".  Also check OneTime.com to get a good baseline on prices, then move to the airlines themselves to see if they are better.   If the price is good I'll go ahead and book but if it seems too high (as did 500+ for this Boston Trip), I keep on surfing to Travelocity, Expedia, CheapTickets.   This was my first try with Cheapseats and I'll use them again for sure since they came through for me today.  THANKS Cheapseats! 

Generally the BEST way to save money on airline tix is to have a VERY flexible schedule and be able/willing to fly from major airport to major airport.   Rural areas like mine tend to have fewer good deals than metro areas.

3 days in the wilderness…

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Well, not exactly wilderness.   Lake Odell Resort in Oregon is one of my very favorite places.   We rented a nice cabin and hung out for 3 days in the snowy forest land near Crater Lake National Park.  The kids (and parents a few times)  could sled right out the door of our cabin down a small hill, down the path between the cabins, past the lodge, and down to the lake's edge.    The dog had a ball except for his plunge into the icy lake, which freaked me out as much as Chico.  

No internet, phone, or TV for 72 hours.    I guess I could live without them for longer, but glad to be back in the zone. 

Web 2.0 at MIX06. Mike to Yellow Pages “You are DEAD!”

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You couldn’t have picked a better panel for Web 2.0 than here at MIX06. Tim O’Reilly, who was/is the closest thing to Mr. Web 2.0 until perhaps Michael Arrington who was also on the panel along with Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo, Royal Faros of Microsoft’s new messenger initiatives (which look really neat), and Ebay’s Adam Trachtenberg.

Of course as with all things Web 2.0 one left more confused than before the session, but that goes with the territory these days. Monetization is unclear even for companies that are cited as “successes” in the space such as delicious and flickr.

My favorite quote of the conference was Arrington to the Canadian Yellow Pages company asking how they could morph into a 2.0 company. “You are dead!” he said, I think meaning that UNLESS they changed their old style, usurous advertising fees, yellow page publishing empire would be overrun by Web 2.0s. He even felt EBAY was at risk, feeling they are protective of their 1.0 status.
I’m not so sure about that – in fact I’m increasingly skeptical of Web 2.0 as an easily monetizable phenomenon even as I am more convinced than ever that it’s a profound change in communication, information, and global community.

Don’t overestimate the power of Pizzazz – but don’t UNDERestimate it either!

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We are working on a new project at Online Highways – a regional search engine for travel.   It could be great because our former excellent programmer Marvin has already developed Kinosearch and it’s well suited to this task. Vertical search is really hot as a Web 2.0 theme and we should be able to put out a great spam free travel search for the Oregon Coast and should be able to scale it up if it gains traction as a spam free alternative to the increasingly problematic big engine searches for local travel information.

But I’m worried about the name, which currently is “CRSE.com”.   “Cooperative Regional Search Engine”.  Yikes – that sucks.

My partner is right that that people usually have too MUCH enthusiasm for Pizzazz and too little for the substance of a project, but that’s a problem with the wrong emphasis, not a problem with Pizzazz which can be important to the success of a project.