great takes on family travel in the U.S.

I need a personal assistant to manage my online identities. Between Facebook, Linked In and some online dating sites I won’t name (lest I reveal too much), keeping up with it all is getting ridiculous.

How many different ways can I get “pinged” on Facebook? I’ve been poked, super poked, bitten, given a wedgie, had a pie thrown at me, not to mention invitations to take movie quizzes, geography tests and guess which celebrity belongs to which buttocks. Reminiscent of 5th grade, there are also a few applications implying that someone might like me and I can find out if only I will disclose a few things about myself - like sending 10 friends an invitation that implies someone might like them and if they would only disclose a few things about themselves…

I think a person with experience playing tennis with a machine gun would make for a good Facebook Secretary. A key task would be to return the daily barrage of pings, pokes and put-ons. Then, since I have a secretary, the obvious next step for me would be to escalate! I won’t just be able to return fire, I will serve it up like I don’t have a day job. My connections will be so impressed with how quickly I can initiate ever newer, technologically enhanced ways to say “what up, dude?”

But I don’t want just a tactician, mind you. I want a professional administrative assistant - someone with a real strategic vision for who I want to be online. Should I be a Linked In slut with 500+ connections and accept and seek every connection possible? Or should I at least know the people I am connected to? And how should my Linked In relate to my Facebook? Just because I worked with you that doesn’t mean we are friends.

A good secretary would be able to recommend a course of action to me by answering key questions, like what happens when I press “REJECT” on an invite. Does the sender get a “YOU WERE FLUSHED!” message? If so, I will continue to keep them sitting in my request list unanswered as I have for the last two years. If not, could someone please tell me that so I can flush these people and clear up the clutter in my inbox?

As far as the dating sites go, wow, that is a-whole-nother realm. Could I really expect to hire someone with the ability to keep track of all the lies I tell about myself? And could my Facebook secretary help keep away the fear that someday the woman from Lavalife will be able to post a Date Review and share it with all the mutual-to-three-degrees-of-separation “friends” we share across five social networking sites?

Oh Facebook Secretary, how did I ever live without you?

Well I wasn’t expecting this. I did a little satirical piece about what its like to do web design in the Google Era:

And it got quite a response at places like Sphinn, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and so on.

Like all new companies trying to attract consumers, the Kango team struggles with myriad challenges that at times seem a bit unrelated to our core mission of helping travelers take great vacations. Getting into the Google index and the indexes of Yahoo, Ask, MSN, etc is absolutely critical. It is how we will survive.

We know we will be offering great content to our users, which is the best long term strategy for success. But as a new site especially it’s hard to get the search engines to notice you quickly. So you have to do lots of things like asking all your friends to link to you and hiring SEO consultants to advise you. For every SEO consultant with advice there is another one with somewhat different advice around the corner. It’s amusing and can be frustrating trying to figure out what the magic formula is.

And it seems like much of the advice revolves on more links. Links, links links. You link to yourself so Google understands how you are structured and which pages you think are relevant and for what purpose. You need other people to link to you so Google thinks you’re important. You often have to link to other people in return. Once you get established and have a lot of people linking to you, it becomes easier because your links are worth more. Links, links, links – and not fancy Javascript links either.

The crazy thing is that it works. Google remains the place to be listed and the other search engines of course use the same model.

The challenging part for our rock-star design team is how to balance all the link requirements and still provide a great user experience. Sign up for our private beta program and we hope you’ll think we’ve only designed for a great user experience. Let us know.

- MeanGene

At home we take for granted recycling programs. It has become easy, part of our daily routine. And when we can’t do it on vacation, it almost makes us feel dirty and out-of-sorts. Its like when you live in a city (or state) that has banned indoor smoking and then travel to state that doesn’t ban indoor smoking. At least with smoking you don’t have to contribute to that gross smell and feeling. When your travel destination doesn’t recycle, it’s hard to avoid making garbage.

The sheer enormity of the problem is mind boggling. I visited my time share in Cabo San Lucas last year. Fortunately it has its own desalinization plant, so I wasn’t using up lots of bottled water. But I was using tons of glass bottles and aluminum cans for juice, a lots of paper in the form cardboard cereal boxes, local newspapers, flyers, advertisements, promotional brochures, etc.

Every time I threw something out (or pretended I wasn’t really throwing it out by leaving the item next to the trash can in the hopes that the recycle fairies would rescue it) I’d get that dirty feeling. I would mentally calculate the number of articles I threw out that day that I would have normally recycled, times the number of rooms at this large time share, times the number of days in the year, times the number of similar large hotels/time-shares in Cabo San Lucas (pictured). It was staggering.

From our experience in the US, we know it is tough to institute recycling programs. Tough but doable. It takes commitment and it takes a few large groups that are committed to providing enough volume of recyclable materials to make it worthwhile. In large resort towns, this means if the large resorts don’t recycle, then no one in the town or the whole area will recycle. But it also means that once a critical mass of resorts starts, it can and will spread. A local market for the recycling inputs, outputs and services can be formed and sustained. It means more local jobs. And it sends the message that those visiting tourists do care about the local environment.

So herewith is a suggestion. If you’d like your timeshare to institute a recycling program, let them know. If your timeshare has a recycling program, leave a comment here and share with others readers. Let’s work together and encourage recycling programs to protect the environment in those very places whose environments are so beautiful we want to visit them. And for more discussions on eco-friendly travel, visit Simple Green Choices.