The Travelogue (in addition to being the title of albums by both Joni Mitchell and The Human League) is one of the great traditions in writing. From ancient sagas, through to Kerouac’s pseudo fictional ‘On the Road’ and Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s ‘Long Way Round’ (and Down), travel stories have always been a part of our culture. They capture the imagination and take us as virtual passengers on epic journeys.  The Travelogue is journalism in its true sense, it is a journal or diary of events; one that educates and informs.

It seems to me that a blog provides us with the perfect platform for travel writing.  Not only are we privy to the grand tour but the immediacy of the blog means that we can follow the trip as it happens.

I have two colleagues writing Travelblogs as we speak; one in Russia and the other in New York.  You can follow Liz Dewhurst’s adventures on Madison Avenue here at PR Media Blog.  Michael Cooper and his mate Scott are telling Slavic tales at Mike and Scott’s Russian Blogski.  These are two modern takes on a great writing institution.  No pressure then guys.

Now, unless you’ve been living on Mars or with that recently discovered tribe of rainforest indians, it can’t have escaped your notice that the economy’s in trouble.

So how can Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling’s comments in the Guardian be blamed directly for a fall in the pound and the FTSE?

Commentators have been banging on for months about the likely longevity of this financial crisis, so how do the Chancellor’s words have such a direct influence on the markets?

Well, maybe they do; maybe they don’t. But, the point is, the confluence of these two events is too tempting not to connect in the eyes of the media. That might be exposing my somewhat rudimentary grasp of international finance, but it goes to show that loose talk - if not costing lives in this instance - may not help Mr Darling come Cabinet reshuffle time.

I posted yesterday about the efforts that the Democrats/Google are making to facilitate ordinary bloggers at the Democrat National Convention in Denver. There is a huge resource called the Big Tent, sponsored by Google, complete with broadband access, editing kit and access to the politicians. 

Guardian have posted a cracking video report from inside Google’s Big Tent. Its 4 minutes+ so it won’t eat up too much of the day.  Last year I had a press pass for the Labour and Lib Dem conferences, so I spent a lot of time inside the facilities they provide for the UK mainstream media. Their bloggers tent is a 5 star hotel versus our political parties’ version of Fawlty Towers!

OK, I admit, I was giddy to find out that there was one at the end of my street when I moved out here. It’s a mecca for all food-lovers/foreign-supermarket addicts and prides itself on being the world’s largest retailer of natural and organic foods.  I was intrigued by Wholefoods and its brand message - ‘food labels that inform not confess’, and had high expectations of the store.

I think I pretended to like it for the first few visits but then reality actually kicked in as I started to realise a common theme to each trip:  

1. Enter store and wander around aimlessly for the first 20 minutes, slightly overwhelmed by the amount and range of food on offer.
2. Get confused by the way all the prepared foods are labelled up – some by nationality, some depending upon whether they are hot or cold and other random ones e.g. Indian curries being dubbed as ‘comfort’ food.
3. Slight panic as I realise how many people have dipped into the food that day and also wondering just how long the food has been sat there for.
4. Thinking can I really be bothered queuing for another 20 minutes in a long line that sweeps around the store, only to be faced with a military-style member of staff who barks the number of the till you have to quickly move to?

 Wholefoods - not a great instore experience and in my opinion, totally overrated.

NYC Waterfalls In the sizzling hot heat of the summertime, what better way for a city that prides itself on art and culture, than to create a temporary art exhibition of waterfalls around the city?   The temporary installations are dotted around Manhattan and Brooklyn, with cruises running each day, every 30 mins. Sunset’s the best time to go as the waterfalls light up from behind and you get stunning views of the city. Check them out 

They are everywhere. whether it’s lifts, shops, down the streets or even in their very own designated ‘dog parks’, the cuddly, smelly and giddy canines have officially taken over the city. From pugs to pitbulls, shiatsus to sausage dogs, the canines strut around town with the most glam NYC attitude, looking like they are the ones taking their owners out for a stroll. At first glance, it’s not that tough being an NYC pooch, with the options being endless - getting groomed, having a play or even going to a fellow canine’s birthday party, bar mitzvah or wedding - all revealed here.

 Of course there’s a downside. Inevitably, it means that there are more dogs to get abandoned and mistreated. Pedigree is a brand that is dedicated to the cause – afterall, why shouldn’t a brand take it one step forward? A can of dog food can’t take care of a dog for all of its life. And so, the brand dedicated itself to an annual dog adoption drive, with their most recent campaign including a pop up store in Times Square. The store acted as an adoption centre that enabled dog lovers to meet the adoptable dogs, make donations to support the cause and people an easy way to show their love of dogs. It was also made for a great store experience. Another part of the campaign was an installation of bright yellow dogs in central park, each one carrying a quote such as ‘I wish I was home’. Great, clever marketing that targeted probably one of the biggest and most intense dog-loving cities in the world.

I often talk about how politicians can use new media to connect better to Party members. Here’s an enterprising Tory who has set up Tory Radio, an online radio station dedicated to doing just that. In the spirit of Tories online, here’s Iain Dale  interviewing him on Telegraph TV.

You can’t beat good regional info when rolling out a story. National media like it as it makes good comparisons and gives a national story some proximity to the reader. Regional media like it for obvious reasons and that gives quantity to your media outputs.

The key though is to abandon the idea that regional data translates as wide govt/TV region definition e.g. North West, South East. The only valuable way of doing it is to break down into town based data. But doesn’t this make your omnibus survey really expensive? Yes, but relying on those kinds of omnibuses really is a bit lightweight.

If you think a bit more about it you can always overlay town-based info from official sources such as ONS or polling people online and asking them which is their nearest town from a drop down list.

Mind you, it can get confusing when in the space of two days you find out that Powys is one of the worst hit towns for falls in disposable income, (full disclosure: this is one of ours!) but one of the happiest. Manchester is the second happiest, although its the capital of self-harm!

The eyes of the world’s media are trained on Denver, the scene of the Democrat National Convention (DNC), where Barack Obama aims to show everyone that he can hold the most powerful (elected) role on the planet. You would expect it to be a media circus but lets peak behind the curtains a bit.

This race has seen relations with the blogosphere professionalised in a way that holds many lessons for corporate and public bodies over here in the UK. Here’s an example. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is investing big in a media centre for bloggers at the DNC. Highlights;

 Google Inc. will help set up a two-story, 8,000 square-foot headquarters for hundreds of bloggers descending on the Democratic convention in Denver next week, and it will offer similar services at the Republican convention in September, as new media gain influence in politics.With its financial support for the “Big Tent” blogger facility at the Democratic convention, Google stands to gain exposure and goodwill from 500 or so bloggers who paid $100 for access to the facility, run by a coalition of bloggers. Google’s software and services will be featured, including a kiosk in the public area of the tent where anyone can post videos on YouTube. “Four years ago, YouTube hadn’t been founded yet. Now, it will have booths at each convention to help delegates and bloggers upload videos taken on the floor or at events around town.

“It’s an amazing opportunity for us. You don’t get all these people in one place but every four years,” says Robert Boorstin, director of corporate and policy communications in Google’s Washington office and a former Clinton administration official.

Not only will bloggers have Internet access, workspaces and couches for napping in the “Big Tent” headquarters, they will be provided food and beverages, Google-sponsored massages, smoothies and a candy buffet. On the final night of the convention, Google is co-sponsoring a bash with Vanity Fair magazine for convention-goers and journalists that has become one of the hottest party invites.

Google will offer similar amenities for bloggers and new-media reporters who attend the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., company officials say. It will demo a variety of new political tools next week, including a search function on YouTube that will offer almost real-time keyword searches of convention speech videos.

The fascinating bit is that McCain’s team actually have set up base just a few blocks from the convention centre to counter the messaging! What does that involve? Well, you hire a big venue, invite all your mainstream media chums (don’t really have to invite - they’ll come automatically once you tell them where you’re gonna be), give bloggers free hotel rooms, and make sure you’ve got big trucks with satellite dishes on them.

Also bring along a few protestors who have some beef with Obama (either they’re “pro-Hillary” or “pro-life” or something or other), and then bring a few far left anarchist protestors as well (just to spice things up). Then go around the city and shake hands and kiss babies, making you look like the man on the street, and the black guy is made to look like an elitist rock-star.

They’ve set up this site as a focus for the ‘counter-messaging’ (great American-type term that will inevitably surface here!).

They’ve posted the reaction from Fox News’ Brit Hume on the home page:

“What’s interesting about this to me is I have never seen the campaign that is idle, if you will, during the other candidate’s nominating convention have as much of an impact before, and I think it owes something to the phenomenon of these what we call ads, and I guess in some broad sense they are. But what they really are, are Internet videos that are being published to the Internet and they spread around in this day and age very quickly and are probably as good as paid ads and I guess there’s some paid advertising going on. But, this is, wouldn’t you say Carl, from your experience, that this has been remarkable the extent to which the McCain camp has succeeded in intervening, so to speak, in this convention?”

Mozilla, the people behind the popular Firefox web browser, announced today a new project that could will change the way we engage with the internet.

Ubiquity has a simple goal: ‘to enable the user to instruct the browser (by typing, speaking, using language) what they want to do’.

The smartest part of the software is making use of language and allowing a computer to understand what we mean without us mere mortals having to modify our speech or writing patterns.

Imagine typing (or even saying) “book a flight for me from Manchester to London, leaving on Monday and returning on Wednesday, the cheapest, then email my colleagues in London office the flight details and add to my calendar. Oh and book me a hotel with at least four star reviews for the same dates.” You understand what I mean. If I had a personal assistant, they would probably make this happen. But my computer didn’t do anything. Not a thing.

As Aza points out:

“We aren’t there yet. Instead, we have the rudimentary systems of structured natural language commands. You can select something and Ubiq “translate this to French”, or “email it to Jono”. In both cases, Ubiquity is smart enough to realize what “this” and “it” refers to, as well as knowing who Jono is (by talking with my web-mail’s contact list). It’s also smart enough to be able to understand commands like “map Chicago Comics” and “yelp Tapas near SF” and give you rich previews and search results to get you where you want to be quickly. Even better, both of those commands let you insert results directly into, say, an email you’re writing so that you never have to interrupt your chain of thought.” Genius.

Robert Scoble notes that this will only be picked up by passionate internet users but I believe that once this is adopted by an even bigger player, most likely as copycat software introduced to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, that’s when everything changes.

I can even imagine Steve Jobs taking to the stage in a couple of years time to explain how the new version of Safari can take care of everything for you. Just type it in and BOOM!

There’s no need to wait for a keynote from Steve or Steve. If you’re a passionate internet user you can take a sneak peak at the future right now with this video. Or go one step further and download Ubiquity for Firefox.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.