It took far too long.. But finally.. her we go with the finest selection of pictures taken on our Vienna journey this year! No special password required, you only need the one for this year.
There were three problems while handling the picture series: Firstly, I had to take account the different sources for the pictures. They where shot with five different cameras!. Secondly there where a view panoramic pictures, which had to be calculated. Thirdly, the pure amount of over 1000 pictures taken in four days was a little overwhelming.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life, Travel at 07:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

[Trigami-Review]

Prologue

Travelers always have been an interesting target for web communities – they seek information about places far away – and they want information tailored to their specific needs and they want it reliable. All those are requirements an internet community about travel can give them. People writing about all those places – probably people similar to them be it backpacking or staying in 5* hotels can be found in communities. Also you’ll have the chance to make a picture of those people visiting their profiles or following their posts, and therefore be able to judge about the reliability about information.

But I don’t want to write epic descriptions about travel communities in general – just to set up those three features I would seek for in travel communities:

• get information about places far away
• tailored to my needs
• get community functions to connect with other and to allow me to judge about reliability

Depending on the extend those features are fulfilled I might be interested in sharing my own experiences in such a community

The community

Thanks to Trigami, I was made aware of the chance to have a glimpse at the new travel community dodo.com. Choosing the exotic and extinct dodo-bird (not to confuse with the professor at the University of Bamberg, carrying that first name) as an mascot. Dodo.com provides six main navigation sections.

• The first home sections gives an overview about current community activities like new travel tips, new members, new fotos, new videos and new travelogue entries.
• The second section “travel tips” shows user reviews about something the different sections remind me a bit to qype, where you can write reviews about places, restaurants and sights, too.
• “Travelogues” consists of peoples travel experiences. Each entry there is accompanied by a map, showing the location of area it is about, and information about the member writing the entry.
• Then there are two sections with Photos and videos. Each is offering “new” and “popular” items, and a categorization via country. You are also encouraged to upload your own material – but it hast to be attached to a travelogue.
• The last section probably is the most interesting one – the classic “my”-section being the gateway to most of the individual community settings & connections. You can get an overview about your profile there, change your Profile, see all your travel tips, travelogues, photos, videos, bookmarks and of course your friends and messages.
• Apart from those main features there is also the obligatory (?) making of Blog with information about the making of dodo.com. It’s quite interesting to catch a view pictures of the young team behind dodo.com there.

My thoughts

So far dodo.com offers all features, which are quite essential to publish some travel information on the net. All items on the homepage are well structured and easy to understand. Even a total beginner, or people not to familiar with Internet communities should have no problems in getting around at the homepage. The requirements I stated in my prologue are partially fulfilled. I can retrieve infos, I can judge a little bit, by looking into people’s profiles – but how can I tailor them to my needs? Some more categories e.g. “backpacking” or “luxury travel” or at least a basic folksonomy could greatly improve likelihood to find interesting information.

But it is still beta so the features are yet(?) limited. They provide a well working homepage, but they lack some excellence I would hope for, in such a new piece of social software. Things I would like to see there:

• Possibility to link external media sources – connect the community to your feeds on Flickr, Youtube, Blip.tv, picasa, Gallery2
• Connect your personal profile to other travel related pages e.g. Couchsurfing and hospitalityclub
• Make the content accessible via Folksonomy (aren’t tag clouds always a nice gimmick?)
• More options for your profile. If you’ve seen a few facebook profiles, you know how much time people might actually spend organizing there user profile. A portfolio of widgets and the possibility to post own marked up code should be a minimum

I'm really interested in following the further development of the community.

You're chance to win!

In order to encourage users to register and become active members of the dodo.com community the makers are making a draw at the end of the year, giving away a trip worth 10.000 EUR. The more activity and the more persons you invite into the community, the higher your chance to win! So if you sign in to dodo.com – be kind and use my invitation link.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found, on subject, Travel at 12:25 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Yesterday a storm was brewing over Neuhausen ob Eck. It raged over the grounds of the southside festival grounds and tore down one of the stages. While this tent was demolished a huge piece of metal hit through a rescue vehicle and killed a paramedic, who was sheltering inside.

Luckily, there are no more storms in the weather forecast for the weekend, also the festival organisation thinks that it will be possible to rebuilt the stage or to find an alternative. But they ask everybody to postpone the arrival for the festival to tomorrow to give themselves more time to get the grounds into shape again. Not the best promises.. Anyway. I'm still hoping for a great festival!

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in mobile, Travel at 18:09 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Seems like I owe you a little explanation for my changed header picture First I found that nice image a few weeks ago and thought it would fit very well – although being a little “retro”. It shows (from right to left) Andi, To and me on our first skiing trip to Laax some years ago.

Thx to my friend Berit I’ll be skiing once again this weekend! I know this seems awfully early but the Erdinger brewery has organized a trip to the glacier of Hintertux (you can go skiing on some tiny glacier-slopes the whole year there), and Berit won two tickets for this event through Antenne Bayern. Seeking for someone to join her on this trip Berit found me, and now the two of us will be on our way to Hintertux this Saturday

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Travel at 19:40 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The weather was a real dream – blue skies, temperatures above 25°C – only the relatively cold water at the swimming pool was a little annoying. Anyway, it was the perfect day to be lazy and to enjoy the sun. I managed to finish reading Gabor Steingart’s recent book, and was busy preparing some blog-postings.

Dinner: Spaghetti a la carbonara – Pizza funghi porcini - Profiteroles

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Travel at 08:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

On Monday the next bigger town with some decent supermarkets was our target to restore our almost empty food and vine supplies and to watch out for some local products. We first headed for the big Coop supermarket, which is part of a small shopping mall in Sinalunga. There we got almost everything we needed, but then our curiosity made us visiting the local branch of Lidl. Guess what – about half of the products are about the same… Even the pricing of the goods was similar – that’s globalisation in its pure form.

Dinner: soup – sausages – dark chocolate

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Travel at 21:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Friday night 11:58pm it was done

• the car fully packed
• house and farm secured
• seating order inside the car figured out
• root planning and who drives when figured out.

We were on out way to Italy!

I had to pack my stuff in two instances, since I didn’t have all the necessary goods in Bamberg, but it was not to complicated for me since I don’t need too much stuff on such a holiday: Some adequate clothing, photo camera, my notebook computer and something to read. Not too big requirements. But since the lens of my camera is still broken I had to borrow some replacement. Luckily Jochen helped out and lent me his EF-28-135mm IS. Books to read I had organized the day before, notebook and external hard disk to deal with some media during my holidays I had packed in Bamberg, so I only had to complete my clothing in Truppach.

I had the honour to drive the first part of the about 1000km to Acquaviva/Siena in the southern Tuscany. My father’s BMW X5 is a nice car, but driving on the highway I’d have somehow preferred my limousine. Manual gear shift, less noise while driving and a better holding on bends are my arguments in favour of my car. But I guess complaining about this is just nit-picking because I’m not used to the X5, and I’ve been driving my 5-series for about 5 years… traditionally we didn’t take the Brenner Highway, but the old mountain pass, but I made it down to Sterzing in a decent time. There we had a two hours break, before my father took us down the remaining distance. On the way down there we had a remarkable incident with our BMW navigation system. Between Bologna and Modena it received a traffic Jam through it’s TMC and wanted us to drive some 200(!)km detour. We didn’t listen to its recommendation – and at the end there was no jam at all!

Arriving shortly between 12am we immediately got our flat, and could relax there after a strenuous journey. Later that day we shortly visited Montepulciano to buy some stuff at the local supermarket, and at the end of the day we had a very delicious dinner at the L’Angolo restaurant in Acquaviva.

Dinner: Spaghetti a la carbonara – Pizza L’Angolo - Profiteroles

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Travel at 17:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The next highlight this year will be the holiday with my parents in Italy. Once more we will explore the beauties of Tuscany. Two years ago we have spent a really great week in September. Although it made me miss a lot of the actions related to our nude calendar. This year we will stay at the beautiful Borgo delle More from the 16.9.-23.9.. Preparing myself for this event I finally sorted through the pictures I took in 2004 and they are now available here.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Travel at 11:55 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (2)