Category Archives: travel

Oregon Retirement

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[crackle-crackle-ssssss=pfffffttt!] … we interrupt the technology ramblings to bring you mildly shameless promotions of things I have some interest in.  Also, of course, these blog posts help me understand how blogs are ranked for various phrases and words in search engines …

Oregon Retirement is an excellent project by some friends of mine who are very familiar with the Retirement landscape in Oregon and across the country.   I’m going to partner up with them as we create a national site about retirement in the USA.    We’ll be covering both as a site and as a blog many issues relating to retirement and also featuring retirement communities across the country as well as great cities in which to retire.   The site will feature an extensive database of retirement places, a social network, and a blog.  More about this in future posts. 

Fred’s Facebook Ad test

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Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson is always up to something interesting, and his current Facebook test is no exception to that rule.   He’s making a modest buy on a 1000 ads / $10 per day mostly just to see how the new Facebook targeting works for his Union Square Partners advertising.     

Unfortunately a VC firm is not likely to get much “business” from Facebook, so maybe I should fork over the pizza per day price for a test on something like motel bookings or air travel?

However I’m pretty confident the money would be wasted.  As I’ve suggested before Social Network advertising, targeted or not, is nothing like Google SERPS advertising and it’s become hard enough to leverage that to any advantage in the travel space.

Driving under the influence of computers

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 The DARPA autonomous vehicle competion is on today in California.   It’s sponsored by the US military’s advanced technology division and seeks to create vehicles that can navigate without human intervention.  

The stakes are high in this competition where the top vehicles will take home millions in prize money – presumably for their university research.

These vehicles would be remarkable enough if they simply roamed through the desert as in past competitions, but this year the DARPA challenge is taking place in an urban environment, where fifty regular cars with human drivers will be zigging and zagging and presenting the autonomous vehicles with the advanced challenges of driving in a city.

Ashlee at The Register is liveblogging the event, though she seems pretty grumpy from the lack of coffee.   C’mon Ashlee, the military only has a $500,000,000,000 budget – and you want free coffee?

An autonomous ground vehicle is a vehicle that navigates and drives entirely on its own with no human driver and no remote control. Through the use of various sensors and positioning systems, the vehicle determines all the characteristics of its environment required to enable it to carry out the task it has been assigned

Science on a Sphere

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Wow, NOAA has a great educational tool – a large spherical display representing earth, using computers and projectors to animate the display.  It is called Science on a Sphere.

Here’s a list of locations that have this.

It looks like a schools could build one of these for themselves, though I’m not clear any have done it and not clear on copyright issues – they say this is not an open source project.   It appears the cost would be in the neighborhood of 5-10,000 for the hardware consisting of 4 projectors and 5? computers, but I think the main challenge for schools would be the room.   Many schools don’t have a “spare room” they could easily dedicate to this project and it appears it’s complicated enough that it would be difficult to put up and take down for each lesson.

But what a great concept!   A few years ago we visited the Delorme world HQ back east and they had a  scale model of earth that was 3 stories high and rotated.   But the NOAA Science on a Sphere is better because you could project data and topography and vary the lessons.

Of course as a cheap alternative teachers should (MUST!) get “Google Earth” to all the students they have.    Google earth is arguably the best cheap visualization tool ever to hit geography and if you have not seen it get it now – it’s free and fantastic.   

Oregon Retirement

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Wow, I’m doing some research for an Oregon retirement website and just learned that according to  recent survey  the   2004 book called “Retirement Places Rated” out of hundreds of retirement areas in the USA two of the top ten places to retire in the USA are right in my back yard – one of them actually includes my back yard because it’s the Medford / Ashland area here in Southern Oregon. The other is Florence, Oregon – number one in the survey of over 300 places. I travel there often and personally prefer this area due to much better weather and our abundant big-city amenities in a small city, but Florence Oregon is a really nice place too and it’s the home of Oregon Coast Magazine and our Online Highways websites including this great Oregon Travel section in case you are planning a trip to Oregon. Our Travel Blog is here and I’ve posted a few good Oregon travel references as a warmup to the big blog I’m starting this month that will cover the entire state of Oregon. More on that later.

Locals call this the “Rogue Valley” and historically our wonderful region does very well in national “best places to retire” and “best places to live” surveys. I’ve lived in the East, Midwest, several California cities, and here in the Rogue Valley and it’s hard to imagine a better place to raise a family or retire. The houses are relatively expensive and the economics for a wage earner are the most challenging aspect here which may be why the population remains modest, though growth in some of our areas has been dramatic.

Tennis at the Burj-al-Arab?

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Burj-al-Arab

This is one of those real things that at first seems too amazing to believe until you do a little research to confirm that it is in fact a real Tennis Court – the highest in the world.  The Burj-al-Arab is one of the world’s most luxurious and spectacular hotels.   Rooms are $2000 per night unless you opt for a top suite where you can expect to pay some $28,000 per night.

The helipad at the top of the hotel was turned into a tennis court for Andre Agassi and Roger Federer when they were visiting for the Dubai Open.    Amazing.

Hotel Pictures

Burj-al-Arab website

Online advertising juggernaut rolls on.

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This Internet Advertising Bureau report notes that online advertising is still showing explosive growth.    Interesting is the fact that the types of online advertising – with search ads at the top – seems to have stabilized somewhat with “pay for performance” one of the few categories that has clearly increased from last year.   

 I don’t think this stability reflects the “optimal” mix of ads, rather it is more an indication of how the big players take some time to get comfortable with innovations in advertising, and still stick to more traditional CPM style approaches rather than the clearly superior PPC and pay per performance models.   Clearly even many of the big advertisers and agencies still have fairly weak SEM and SEO departments so they’ll choose to use big CPM campaigns that are easy to analyze rather than the more productive – but more complicated to manage – PPC and performance approaches.

Online ads are now a mainstay of any good campaign, but it’ll take some years before advertisers realize the foolishness of many online advertising approaches which generally include bloated CPM impression campaigns.   Much more effective are targeted organic and PPC ad campaigns, but these require more analysis and a newer perspective.

The most conspicuously stupid type of campaign – still extremely popular in travel – is to use expensive print advertising in an attempt to boost online visitation.  I studied this *extensively* across many print ad types during my work marketing southern Oregon several years ago and despite the clear results that showed print ads lead to only a tiny number of online visits, many travel marketers still think print is an effective way to promote online.    It’s not, but it will continue until the incentives and simplicity of squandering money on ineffective print advertising go away.   The lack of research in this area is odd to me given the huge total travel advertising spend, but most travel research is self-serving and often sponsored or conducted by the very agencies or entities that benefit from certain results, so stupid biases remain intact for a long time.

Halo 3 and the statue of the 3 lies

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Speaking of Boston MA as I (ummm … sort of) did yesterday, MIT students have pulled a great prank on Harvard by decorating the famous statue in Harvard Yard as a Halo 3 fighter.

The “John Harvard” statue may now get nicknamed “Statue of the FOUR mistakes”. Ironically the statue has three big mistakes as it sits in the hallowed yard of Harvard University, that bastion of intellectual achievement.

Also called sometimes “The statue of the three lies”, the mistakes are:

The statue isn’t really John Harvard. It was commissioned after his death and he had no known portraits so a student sat for the artist.

John Harvard was not the founder of Harvard. It’s named after him, founded by Mass. legislature.

Statue has the wrong date for the founding of Harvard. 1636 is correct, statue shows 1638.

Las Cruces

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So, the Las Cruces question today relates to whether Google’s “SERPs”, or Search Engine Results Pages, give good quality results for the Query “Las Cruces”.    This post is also part of the nmohwy SEO experiment.    To determine this we’ll take the top page of results and look at each one of them.   In SEO terms this is called “scraping” a page and is usually considered bad form and even illegal in some circumstances if you do it over a large number of pages to create a new website, but in this case the scraping action has good legitimate use, especially because it’ll help me determine the most appropriate content for the Las Cruces web page at NMohwy.com.   “Most appropriate content” has become a very interesting concept as Google’s search dominance continues.   Without a high Google ranking it is very hard to get much traffic to a website so “pleasing Google” has become almost a necessary condition for the online success of a website.    Yet as Peter Norvig, head of Google search recently noted at a conference there is a huge give and take going on between Google and SEOs that is reshaping the Google results and therefore reshaping the web.   This was an inevitability of Google dominance but I think it’s a very undesirable outcome that is devaluing many of the things the web once valued highly (especially some type of very functional linking relationships that are now seen as “spamming”).

That said, it appears  Google has done a very good job for the query “Las Cruces” with one glaring exception among the top 10 sites.   I’ll discuss each below:

City of Las Cruces – Home

Home page for the beautiful city of Las Cruces, New Mexico, Rated as the best place to retire.
www.las–cruces.org/ – 35k – Cached – Similar pages This, Las Cruces’ official city page, makes sense as the top choice for the query “Las Cruces”.   With a simple query of the form  “city”, it’s not clear if somebody wants Las Cruces Travel Info, City info, news, real estate, etc.   However with most city queries I have reviewed Google tends to go with the official city page first, then the official visitor page second or third.   This is intuitively consistent with what I’d think a user would want from that simple query.

Las Cruces, New Mexico Convention & Visitors Bureau

Official Web Site of the Las Cruces Convention & Visitors Bureau.
www.lascrucescvb.org/ – 68k – Cached – Similar pagesAs noted before this is a logical second page – Visitor Bureaus are usually key point of visitor contact  (smaller cities generally don’t have this function or have it wrapped up as part of the Chamber of Commerce)

Greater Las Cruces Chamber of Commerce Home Page

The chamber of commerce is a not-for-profit organization and is owned and operated by local business leaders who work to promote business growth in the …
www.lascruces.org/ – 25k – Cached – Similar pagesAgain, a logical third choice for Las Cruces NM.     Chambers offer businesses in the region and also will have much visitor and relocation information.

Las Cruces, New Mexico – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Las Cruces is a city in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, United States. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 74267. …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Cruces,_New_Mexico – 89k – Cached – Similar pagesGoogle *loves* Wikipedia.   This is partly for good reason as Wikipedia often has excellent features for many cites as well as millions of other topics.   Recently a university study of Britannica and Wikipedia concluded that the errors in each of these online resources were roughly equivalent, suggesting that Wikipedia, with it’s much greateer number of articles, is actually a more authoritative resource than Britannica.

Las Cruces Sun-News – HOME

Daily news, opinion, sports, arts, entertainment, lifestyle and classifieds.
http://www.lcsun-news.com/ – 105k – Cached – Similar pages

Local Las Cruces news also appears to be an excellent site to rank highly.

Las Cruces NM New Mexico

Las Cruces New Mexico Travel, Restaurants, History, and Relocation.
las–cruces.com/ – 24k – Cached – Similar pages

Las Cruces, New Mexico (NM) Detailed Profile – relocation, real …

Recent posts about Las Cruces, New Mexico on our local forum with over 100000 registered users. Las Cruces is mentioned 1128 times on our forum: …
http://www.city-data.com/city/Las–Cruces-New-Mexico.html – 120k – Cached – Similar pages

City Data is a good site that has created a huge mashup of many public domain data source, images they collect from users, and has a fairly large user forum.  This is their key Las Cruces page and probably a good choice though there are many resources that offer similar information, though I think City Data does a good job of pulling them all together in an unattractive but very usable form. 

New Mexico State University

Located in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
http://www.nmsu.edu/ – 18k – Cached – Similar pages

This result should probably appear higher because Universities are a key part of the community and also a key search destination for many.  However NM State Las Cruces appears to have failed to do (any?) SEO work with the site to let Google know wazzup, thus Google winds up placing them lower than otherwise.

WEBLIFEPRO.COM

http://www.weblifepro.com/lascruces/ – 1k – Cached – Similar pages

This is the only clearly bogus result.   The page is down so this must have been some sort of marketing effort gone bad, perhaps due to manipulative SEO practices.

Las Cruces Public School District

Las Cruces, New Mexico’s Public School District. Calendars of events, board policies. Information on schools, employment, district news, assessment, …
http://www.lcps.k12.nm.us/ – 45k – Cached – Similar pages

This at first appears to be a questionable result for the first page though it could be a result of huge incoming links from kid related sites.  People looking for an elementary school would tend to use “school” in the query.  I suppose this criticism could also apply to the University listing.   Perhaps the demographic for “Las Cruces” searchers has a good variety of ages including young kids,, making this a reasonable result.

So, it appears that for the query “Las Cruces” Google has done a good job of rounding up relevant sources of information.    Google’s strength is working with highly targeted queries so we’ll try that next for Las Cruces New Mexico related stuff.