Most popular camera phones on Flickr

It is amazing how much of a gap the Apple iPhone has over its competitors. Of course there is no doubt about iPone’s incredibly sales success, but it is not as far ahead as this graph suggests.

I believe the graph above is a good piece of data to justify creating applications and content for iPhone users. Why? Because this graph shows that iPhone users, much more than other phone users, are more likely to share stuff online and as a result are more likely to be influencers within their groups of friends.

As you will see from the above, Twitter is the number two result when you search my name in Google, so is an incredibly important channel for my personal brand.

For those who are interested in growing their results in Google, I believe Twitter is one of the easiest ways along with Facebook and LinkedIn that you can start owning the front page of Google.

Why? Because, Google indexes Twitter highly, it is the easiest way to start creating content and even if you do not Tweet regularly your profile and URL inclusion provides another means to direct people to your LinkedIn or Facebook profile.

For those that already have a Twitter account the good people at Twittip have created a list of tips on  more advanced techniques on how to increase the SEO of your Twitter profile.

Some are obvious:

• Ensure you Twitter handle includes relevant keywords (I have gone for my name)
• Ensure your bio also includes relevant keywords – mine has PR and my company name Weber Shandwick
• List your profile in relevant directories such as WeFollow
• Follow relevant people in the hope they find your feed of relevance and link back to you

But two were less obvious (at least to me, but I am no SEO expert) and are currently on my to do list:

You can even SEO your Twitter pic (avatar)…

Yes, you can even SEO your profile picture! You can’t add tags but, you can rename the photo before you upload it that way when it shows up in the URL it will have the keywords that you named. Be careful not to add spaces. Doing that will not translate the link very well. I don’t recommend changing your profile picture but, I would recommend changing the name of the profile picture and re-uploading it. You can do this by clicking on “Settings” and then “Picture”.

Burn Baby Burn…

Burn Your Twitter feed: Why would you want to use an RSS feed for Twitter? Well, by using RSS, people can subscribe to your posts (and in this case Tweets) and get instant feeds sent to them. Just like a blogger would use RSS feeds to increase their popularity with search engines and help draw traffic to their blogs, you can use RSS feeds to do the same for your Twitter account. So, how do you go about doing this you say? I will show you how to set this up in Google FeedBurner.

First you go to FeedBurner. If you have a gmail account you can sign in with this. Otherwise, sign up for a new account.

Next, in a different window open up your Twitter account and scroll down to the middle of your Twitter page and click on the RSS feed icon. Next go to the top of the page and copy the URL. (It should look similar to this: http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/104933666)

Next, paste it into FeedBurner. Then make sure that you add your user name and password so that it won’t be locked when people try and look at the feeds (Use the same format as the highlighted text: http://username:password@twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/15473972.rss). Click next and you have just RSS’d your twitter profile!

Last, go through the dashboard and choose important options for your chosen use of your feed. You can share widgets, add pictures, set up a title for the feed and make sure that it pings (connects) with search engines.

Some interesting stuff hey? Do you have any other tips? I would love to hear them in the comment box.

Isn’t his photo amazing? You couldn’t recreate it if you tried.

This photo was obviously taken at a baseball game, so there was no doubt lots of cameras around, but it got me to thinking how much of our lives nowadays are recorded because of how readily available storage has become.

As storage space becomes more and more cheap, will there come a point in time where almost no point of our lives won’t be recorded. Today, using some simple technology and the storage capacity you probably own already, you could record every conversations you have for a week.

In twenty years from now will people be recording everything they hear, say and see, a la Justin.TV, simply because they don’t want to miss recording a golden moment? How will this impact people’s memories of moment? Will memories be more poignant and important because of that?

When I was 19, I spent six months living in the US as a snowboard instructor. This was before the days when digital cameras were affordable, so I had a simple Kodak film camera. It was brilliant, I could easily put it in my pocket and take photos of my pathetic attempts at freestyle snowboarding, the parties I went to and the beautiful sites I saw. In the six months I was there, I got my way through four 24 shot films. That is 96 photographs, some people, Simone McDermid I am looking at you, post that many from a night out with friends.

When I got back to Australia from my US trip and developed my photos I dutifully wrote on the back of them, threw out the badly shots ones and put the good ones into a photo album. I still look at that album. The memories are still so very real. The moments I remember. Perhaps that is because I didn’t spend many of those moments behind a camera lens, maybe because our mind only needs a few pointers to make us remember? I am not sure.

I recently spent three months travelling through Central Asia and China. I took a considerable number of photos, sometimes 200 a day, which I edited down and posted on Flickr. The time spent behind the lens on this trip compared with my trip to America would have been 100 fold or more even though it was only half as long. The recent trip is still vivid in my memory, but I wonder how it will compare down the track.

Will the sheer number of photographic memories of the trip help me better remember the trip to America with hardly any evidence? I am not sure. What do you think?

HT – Masami Kito for alerting me via Posterous to this image.

The graph above is a stat that I use a lot to show the scale of the digital opportunity in Asia vs the markets organisations typically think of when it comes to digital.

This graph is all the more powerful however, when you consider that less than 20% of Asia currently has access to the internet. Growth of internet, most likely accessed via the mobile phone, will be phenomenal over the next five years in Asia.

It is getting a little bit old now, but this presentation that includes data from an MTV study of youth consumption of the internet in Asia is very worthwhile reading and a nice complement to the graph above if you’re interested in understanding more about internet habits in Asia.

Forrester has updated its social media ladder, part of its ongoing Technographics research series, to include the new group Conversationalists.

According to Forrester, commenting on North American only data:

They’re one-third of the online population. They’re 56% female. If you imagine that they’re just youngsters, you’re wrong: 70% are 30 or older. Their household incomes are about $2,100 above the average online consumer, but their level of engagement is sky-high.

Forrester released its latest APAC region report this month – focussed this time on India. The report does not include the conversationalist group, but I expect we will see this appearing in reports moving forward.

The Forrester Technographics report and particularly the social media ladder is an invaluable tool for providing an overview of the different ways people engage with content online and I use it a lot during client education, especially because it has such rich APAC region data.

If presenting this one thing to remember is that the groups are not mutually exclusive – i.e. a person can be a member of more than one group. I also find it handy to work my way up the ladder taking the audience on a journey of increasing engagement groups.

UPDATE

I came across the graph below after publishing this post. It is an interesting graph that shows movement between the different groups on the social media ladder over a period of three years. Again this is US only data:

There is also this handy tool, that will give you the split of groups by country and age group.

It is a good read, but what I am most chuffed about is the fact that the Huffington Post is linking to a post on this here blog.

No doubt the link is automatically generated, but it is exciting for my egotistic nature no less.

However, the more important thing to learn from this example is the importance of managing your business or personal reputation online. It is vital that reputation managers today are taking notice of what is being posted and shared online about their brands and products – no matter how small or insignificant the site may seem. You never quite know when one of the world’s biggest blogs  could link to one of the world’s smallest blogs and bring a lot of traffic to something previously unknown.

If you or your PR people are not currently monitoring your brands online I suggest you do so immediately. If you get push back from your manager or finance people send them to this post – it may just change their mind.

Teqnolog has prepared a whole heap of charts tracking the number of Tweets individuals and organisations are making across the globe. Within the charts it was interesting to see the ABC right up there in the top Twitter organisations globally.

Of course numbers of Tweets don’t mean much and don’t suggest conversation or engagement, but interesting in my mind none the less.
I doubt very much that the ABC is the world’s most productive news organisation – i.e. only four other news organisations create more stories than the ABC. As such this suggests they are pushing heavy into this territory more so than other organisations.

But on the other hand this stat tells us nothing about the value of the messages being tweeted or the way the ABC is using the medium to engage with its audience.

The ABC has a handy list of its Twitter accounts, but reviewing the majority of these the follwing counts are much lower than the follower counts and most push rather than converse. There are of course exceptions and ones that do provide conversation, but these appear to be in the minority.

Personally I have not really engaged with the ABC Tweets (but that may be my failure?) unlike I have with othe rmedia people like Renai LeMay (ZDNet Australia) and Jack Schofield (Guardian) who mix their tweets that drive to stories with conversation, opinion and true engagement.

What do you think? Have you engaged with the ABC online? Is the organisation using it effectively?

HT to Trevor Young who directed me to the Teqnoblog post.

A nice little PR stunt here for no pants day – an initiative organised by a group called Improv Everywhere. The group claims its mission is to cause ’scenes of chaos and joy in public places’ according to The Daily Mail.

I never fail to be amazed at the media’s desire to run a story that includes visuals of people nude/semi nude or even hinting at nude. Not that I think the journalists are idiots – you only have to look at what stories are most clicked to see that us readers love anything to do with sex, nudity etc.

For example check out what are the top five read stories on smh.com.au at the time of posting:

1.  MP dumped after teenage sex scandal
2. Sex murder trial: MP’s niece ‘horrified’ by what she’s done
3. Woman drives home with body lodged in windscreen: police
4. Sydney’s night of the knife: one charged
5. Doctor struck off for prescribing drugs without seeing man

40% of the most read stories and the top two include the word sex.

Nothing earth shattering here obviously, but when planning your next PR stunt don’t forget the power of sex and the appeal of the nude form. Us media consumers, journalists and bloggers (hey it prompted this post) all love a little bit of titillation.

I came across this outdoor advertising picture on Wally Sabria (http://vicomla.com/blog) and thought it was pretty cool.

I met Wally whilst I was here in LA for a digital leads kick off meeting. A very cool guy he is the creative director for the Weber Shandwick LA office. I wish we had a creative director and design genius in the Sydney office.

Exactly 20 years ago today, a 5.5 richter scale earthquake hit my home town of Newcastle, Australia.

The earthquake, which hit at 10.27 am, killed 13 people and injured 166. The inner city suburb of Hamilton and particularly Beaumont Street, with its rows of shops, was the worst hit. Also devastated was the Newcastle Workers Club, which collapsed in horrifying fashion killing nine people. Thankfully at least in the case of the Newcastle Workers Club, the earthquake hit in the morning when the venue was relatively empty instead of later that night when it would have been full to the brim with people attending a rock show – I can’t find the name of the band, but I want to say INXS.

When the earthquake struck I was jumping on the new trampoline my sister an I had been given for Christmas. An apt place to ride out an earthquake you might say. At the time I was living at 12 Sygna Close, Rankin Park, in a new subdivision. There were new buildings being built all around our house and at first I thought it was one of the new houses nearby that had collapsed. It was only later that we realised it was an earthquake after the theories of an explosion at BHP, a mine collapse and a gas explosion had been discounted by the radio we were listening to with neighbours.

At the time, my mum was working in town at the Commonwealth Bank on Newcomen Street. I remember her recalling how she felt time slowed down and her spinning around to watch the tall glass windows of the bank shaking and moving as the earthquake passed.

Thankfully I didn’t know anybody truly affected by the earthquake. Nobody I knew died, was injured, or was even forced to leave their home so that it could be demolished. Instead thankfully for me the earthquake was simply one of those remarkable life events I experienced. I was one of the ones that could say, ‘5.5 and I survived.’

Fellow Novocastrians what is your ‘5.5 and I survived story’? Where were you when the earthquake struck? I would love to hear your stories.

I am assuming by now you have all seen the news around how Rage Against The Machine staged a coup on the UK Christmas number one via a Facebook campaign, initiated by Jon and Tracey Mortimer.

Good result in my mind and the perfect way to stick it to Cowell. Don’t get me wrong I don’t have anything in particular against The X Factor and actually quite enjoyed watching it when in the UK, but it is hard to be on the side of a man who gets satisfaction out of being nasty to people on national TV.

Now, in an attempt to turn the media coverage, much of which focuses negatively on Cowell, he has offered Jon and Tracey Morter a job.

An interesting tactic, and potentially a good way to shift the media coverage, but boy kinda risky at the same time. Jon and Tracy have made it pretty clear that they are not fans of Cowell’s. The simplest way of putting the boot in now would be to shun his offer and start another embarrassing media cycle for The X Factor supremo.

One to definitely keep an eye on – it will be interesting to see how this plays out. I have a feeling it will not be the result he wants and it will be recognised for what it is. A PR stunt.

What do you think? Clever PR or foolish stunt?

HT to one of my favourite PR men Trevor Yong for bringing this story to my attention.

Today Weber Shandwick (my employer) released a study highlighting the fact that  most of the Fortune 100 companies don’t get how to use Twitter effectively. Though I don’t suspect that was a huge surprise to a lot of people – especially those in the social media space.

The report found that 73 percent of Fortune 100 companies registered a total of 540 Twitter accounts. However, about three-quarters (76 percent) of those accounts did not post tweets very often, and more than half (52 percent) were not actively engaged. (This was measured by engagement metrics such as numbers of links, hashtags, references and retweets.)

In addition, 50 percent of the Fortune 100 accounts had fewer than 500 followers, a small number in relation to the size and reach of a major corporation. Another 15 percent were inactive; 4 percent having been abandoned after being used for a specific event.

Other findings included:

• 41 accounts appeared to be not controlled by the organisation
• 76 percent of accounts had made less than 500 tweets
• 24 percent of the Twitter accounts were primarily used for brand awareness and only 11 percent for customer service

As my colleague Chris Perry, who co-leads our global digital efforts said on Ad Age today:

Most companies fail to realize Twitter’s full potential as a market engagement platform. While 73% of Fortune 100 companies registered a total of 540 Twitter accounts, effectiveness based on level of activity, interaction and engagement were off the mark.

The report makes five recommendations for companies looking to create true engagement and market interaction on Twitter:

1. Listen to conversations
2. Participate in conversations
3. Update frequently with valuable information
4. Reply to people who talk about issues that are important to your company
5. Retweet relevant conversations

I’d be interested to know your thoughts on the study and its conclusions.  What has been your experience with big brands on Twitter? How different would the report look if we were analysing companies in Australia and Asia?

Embeddable version of the report here.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jelles/

In my time working in PR I have been both an agency guy, as I am again now, and also a client, when I worked at Microsoft.

I learnt a hell of a lot during my time inhouse about managing agencies and made a hell of a lot of mistakes. To the wonderful teams I worked with at The Red Consultancy, Three Monkeys, Weber Shandwick UK and Inferno sorry for those mistakes. However I would like to think I learnt along the way and was better at it by the end than I was at the start.

For those managing agencies at the moment, or for those planning on heading in there in the near future, my colleague George F Snell III (isn’t that a brilliant name!), has compiled a list of ten ways you can be a better client.

Read the full list at the link above, but my favourite ones are:

Be polite.

Snarling never gets the job done.  So imagine what happens when you decide not to send terse emails, leave rude voicemails or scold people at meetings?  You get a better and stronger relationship.

Not even Houdini could read minds.

Your PR team can’t deliver the results you expect if you haven’t articulated them.  Be direct.  Tell them what your expectations are and then put it in writing.  When everyone is on the same page there are no surprises.

Micromanaging = bad relationships.

Do you really need to read every single media pitch?  Do you want to be cc’ed on every email among the team?  When everyone can focus on their duties – the job generally gets done better.

Reading through the list though I think there are a few more that could be added.

The client can be wrong

As the client you will not always be right. You may insist on a strategy that doesn’t work out, perhaps even against the better judgement of your agency. If this does happen admit your mistake and work on how the situation can be rectified. A client is not infallible and should not pretend to be.

Clients do not have to be smarter than your agency

Don’t assume you always need to know all the answers. Even when you think you know the answer ask the advice of your team – their response may be a better solution or lead to a better collaborative outcome.

Don’t hold grudges

When mistakes are made on the agency side, address them, put in places measures to limit potential for reoccurrence and then move on.

Big up your agency internally and CC them

Ensure that the people internally recognise the good work your agency does. This will not take the limelight away from you, it will simply reinforce the great work you are responsible for and will ensure your team feels valued.

Any other additions you can think of adding to the list?

Being an egotist, I of course had to put my results in and was fascinated at what I saw. Generally there was small movements up and down, but there was a few posts that really seemed to shift my users numbers drastically.

The two posts that added most followers was a tweet that referenced social media, and the Black eyed Peas. Whilst Black eyed Peas are no doubt incredibly popular, I bet it was the social media words that made pricked people’s and perhaps more likely a few bots’ attention.

The other post that drove a lot of uplift was one I where I added to the #medievalbumperstickers meme that was going on last week. Though the dramatic drop off a few tweets later suggests this may be that Tiwtter was doing something funky?

What was the most damaging? Mentioning HotHouse’s new digital PR man @ScottRhodie…

Obviously all of this needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but interesting regardless.

In computing terms, I live a double life. At work, I use our corporate IT system which runs on Windows XP; at home, I’m a Mac user and have grown accustomed to the Apple environment. But for the last week, I’ve been living in a Windows world, preparing for the launch of Microsoft’s latest operating system.

I borrowed a small, very expensive Sony Vaio X running Windows 7 – the lightest laptop I’ve ever used – and tried to do as much of my work as possible using the unfamiliar operating system. I didn’t carry out the kind of tests you might find in a grown-up review but then most of us don’t do that – we just try to get on with new software and only really notice it when it goes wrong.

If you’re used to one operating system, trying another is like moving into a strange house – it may all look very nice, but it’s a pain trying to find out how to turn up the central heating or where the glasses are stored. But Windows 7 did at least boot up reasonably fast – Microsoft says it’s reduced the “footprint” of the system by 50%, and that’s made it more efficient.

The first thing I want to do when I switch on is connect to the internet. I’m used to searching out a wireless signal at the top of a Mac screen but I found, without too much trouble, a similar connection area to the right of the Windows taskbar and was quickly online.

The Start button in the bottom left-hand corner still provides the route to the applications, though the taskbar has become a little like Apple’s dock, so you can simply drag frequently-used applications onto it.

I set about opening a browser, e-mail and word processing applications, and tried to work out where I would keep my photos and music. That process somehow feels more integrated on a Mac because of the iLife suite that comes with it. But having dragged a few tracks and pictures off my home network into the Vaio, it was reasonably easy to start playing.

But what’s really different about using this operating system? The two things that stood out for me were the ability to hover over open items in the taskbar and see what was happening at a glance – and a function which allows you to snap two open windows alongside each other so that you can compare or maybe transfer information between them.

But here’s a funny thing. By the end of the week, I looked at what I was doing on the tiny screen – and found that just about everything involved software not made by Microsoft. So I’d installed the Firefox browser in preference to Internet Explorer, and started writing documents using Google Docs rather than Microsoft Word, and checking my e-mail via Gmail. As for music, I’d installed iTunes, and to feed my social networking needs, I placed Tweetdeck on the taskbar.

I had ended up furnishing my new Windows 7 home with some familiar items from elsewhere – so perhaps the operating system matters less than it once did.

Of course, what is really important to Microsoft is not winning over the minority who use Mac OS X or Linux variants, but reconnecting with the many previously loyal customers who were deeply unimpressed by Vista.

This week at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, I met Tony Sale, who has spent 15 years working to rebuild Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer used to crack German codes in World War II. At home, Tony has used every version of Windows since 3.1*, but he’s stopped at XP. What was wrong with Vista?

“It tried to tell me how to organise my files all the time, I didn’t like that.” By contrast, Tony says he finds XP very stable and very usable – and he’s going to have to be sure that Windows 7 does a similar, or better, job before upgrading.

Computing has come a long way since Colossus, but Microsoft’s customers will be asking the same question about its new operating system as the code-breakers did about their new-fangled toy. Does it do the same job better and faster than what we use now?

* As some commenters have pointed out, what Tony Sale must have started with was Windows 3.1, not 3.2 as I had previously written.

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My favourite part of this review by Rory Cellan-Jones is this:

I didn’t carry out the kind of tests you might find in a grown-up review but then most of us don’t do that – we just try to get on with new software and only really notice it when it goes wrong.

He is so right. Most people use a fraction of the potential of a software service. A much more realistic way to review a service.

A very interesting post here from MRM Strategy expert Mark Pollard on the importance of Google insights for planning and measuring brand health and campaign success.

Given the wealth of information available by employing free, or near free measurement tools nowadays I am glad I am not in the research business.

An Interesting post above from Guardian’s PDA blog on the public’s reaction to behavioural targetting online.

Most interesting section for me:

Some 66% do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. Meanwhile, 69% think that there should be a law that gives people the right to know everything a website knows about them, a survey by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley, revealed.

An interesting post here from the awfully clever Trevor Young. Whilst I don’t think this will arrest the long term circulation of Playboy it sure has garnered a lot of short term awareness.

Whilst I agree with Trevor’s sentiment generally I don’t necessarily think this is a risk for Playboy. This issue will undoubtedly be a hit on the newsagent racks and will appeal well beyond its fan base. Not that I think PR people shouldn’t be taking risks mind.

Plenty of Asian specific social media in stats in this presentation complied by Ian Stewart, an ex MTV staffer and present Friendster employee in Singapore.

For me this is a real treat! So often stats are US or at best US and European focussed. Great to have some Asian specific numbers for a change.

The most important stats for me:

• 40% (660 million) of all net users are in Asia, but only 16.5% of Asia is online
• The average number of friends on social networks is 107
• On average those in Asia belong to 4 social networks
• On average have 87 IM buddies and 96 numbers in their phone

Monday night marked the launch of The Apprentice Australia, which I watched and enjoyed thoroughly. Though according to Mumbrella, disappointingly for Nine, only 691,999 other people joined me.

One Tim’s post there was a lot of discussion about why this failed. Some people thought the show was on too late, others that The Apprentice concept was tired and more than a few who thought that Mark Bouris was simply not up to the task. None of this was an issue for me. The late-ish slot works for me, I like The Apprentice series (having been a big fan in the UK) and I thought Mark was fine. Though what I thought was lacking was the PR!

I am a fairly big consumer of media, being a PR guy, but the show hardly touched me. This was completely the opposite in the UK at series launch. The Apprentice was absolutely everywhere! Profiles of the contestants appeared in the papers, the radio stations talked about it, the morning current affairs programs cut to scenes of it, celebs were asked their opinion, last year’s contestants gave their insights. There appeared to be little of that here, which is disappointing.

Of course in the UK the show was on BBC, so benefited from the power of its news and influence network. However, Nine, its affiliated online partner ninemsn and magazine stable ACP for all the poor decisions they have made over the last decade are still a media powerhouse.

Maybe I am getting this wrong, I was moving last weekend so didn’t consume the same amount of weekend media that I normally do, but a quick straw poll of some of my friends suggests the same. The PR simply didn’t register.

As momentum around the show heats up perhaps it will all change? I hope so, I really enjoy The Apprentice series and want others to talk with about it.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomhide/

Waking up and seeing the sky a burnt orange colour is a rather scary prospect.

Due to work being stupid busy this week, and needing to be in at the crack of dawn I didn’t take the time to grab my camera and take some shots, but thankfully plenty of others did. Some are below.

Luna Park by http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomhide/

Beach dust storm by http://www.flickr.com/photos/africadunc/

Looking out by http://www.flickr.com/photos/sketchesbymez/

Lots more Sydney dust storm images can be found in this Flickr Gallery.

As my colleague Ian Rumsby put it on his post about the storm:

10,000 miles away, at the very moment Sydney was waking up, the world’s leaders were waving fond farewells in New York at the close of a relatively fruitless effort by the UN to get the climate change agenda back on track. It was difficult to miss the poignancy of the news from New York whilst eating cornflakes in the middle of an orange mist.

And to think there are still global warning deniers.

Hat tip – Stephen Davies

But in the absence of a proper post I thought I would share some of the interesting things I have been reading over the last week.

HabitatUK return to Twitter on Digital Tip

It was in June that HabitatUK learnt the power of social media when they jumped on Twitter and used trending topic hashtags (the most tasteless was the Iran Election) to push signups to their marketing database and furniture discounts . As the blogger who broke the news, and then watched it break all records on Social Media Today, I am very relieved to see them back on Twitter. The case has been used as a benchmark of the cynical use of hashtag spam, been written up on countless posts, news stories and talked about on Twitter. Even though HabitatUK apologised through me via another blog post, and then promptly blamed their intern as the cause of the hashtag spam, they didn’t respond back on Twitter. Until now.

Where Gen Y Leads, Others Follow on Millennial Marketing

A new book,  featured yesterday in USA Today,  says Millennials have significantly impacted retailer practices in technology and merchandising. Titled ’Gen BuY: How Tweens, Teens, and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail’, they call Gen Y “the taste-makers, influencers, and most enthusiastic buyers of today,” who will become “the mature, high-income purchasers of the future.”  The authors conducted surveys and focus groups, interviewed hundreds of Gen Yers, spoke with retail executives and spent lots of time in malls.

Building Rome in less than a day with Photosynth on Geek in Disguise

The University of Washington has built a Photosynth of Rome using 150,000 photos from Flickr and it’s mighty impressive. It took them 21 hours for Rome using Flickr and Photosynth and they’ve also been busy with Dubrovnik and Venice. Check out Dubrovnik below and you’ll see that the resulting synth really is quite amazing. They’re literally reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web.

Wispa Gold Gives Advertising Space To Its Fans on PSFK

To celebrate the return of Wispa Gold and say thank you to fans of the chocolate bar, Cadbury is offering up £2 million worth of advertising space for fans to potentially have their  personal messages displayed on the brand’s billboards throughout the UK and Ireland. Fans need to log in to Wispa Gold Messages and submit their message along with an explanation of why it is special to them. A panel of Wispa Gold fans will select certain ‘gold’ messages which deserve the limelight, and those messages will be displayed on the billboards. If participants need help in designing their message, a panel of Wispa helpers is on hand.

Malaysia: Social Media and Facebook numbers on Laurel Papworth

Malaysian Internet users like Facebook, Myspace, and Friendster. They’re also connecting via Twitter, LindedIn and Plaxo, and eBlogger. They use resources such as Slideshare, iTunes, Flickr, and YouTube.  Nine of the Top 20 websites in Malaysia are social networking sites, and the top 6 sites are Yahoo!, Facebook, Google.com.my, YouTube, Google.com, and Blogger.

Aircel outdoor advertising stunt

UPDATE

Drew in the comment box below has alerted me to the fact that I have linked this advertisement to Aircell, The US broadband provider, rather than Aircel, the Indian mobile provider. I have updated the post below.

ORIGINAL POST WITH EDITS

Aircell, an American airline broadband provider, Aircel, an Indian mobile company, has created quite a storm of late with a clever advertising and PR stunt in Mumbai India.

Working with Indian outdoor agency Primesite, Aircel booked an outdoor media billboard in Mumbai at a spot notorious for flooding. The advertisement featured a dingy attached by rope to the sign accompanied by the Aircel logo and the copy ‘In case of emergency cut rope’.

Once installed the clever people involved in the campaign sat back and waited until the rains started falling. Sure enough in the middle of the monsoon season the site flooded and flooded quickly. So quickly in fact that people were stranded at the location and the only way to get themselves to safety was to cut the rope on the bill board and paddle to safety in the Aircel boat.

A nice story isn’t it. You can view a photo essay of the stunt on this dedicated spot of the Aircel website. Like me you may notice that a few of the gentlemen saved were wearing Aircel t-shirts, and that the people don’t look that stranded, but I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I am not entirely sure how this ties back to broadband in the air, but it has me and This stunt has me and many others blogging about them, has built brand awareness through the media coverage it generated and no doubt would have been a hell of a lot of fun to be involved in. For those reasons I reckon it is a clever campaign.

My suggestion on extending it – auction off the boat on eBay and donate the funds to monsoon victims.

Hat tip to Lexy Klain for bringing this to my awareness.

Global Working Hours

Having worked overseas, one of the questions I often get asked is where do you work harder, in The UK or Australia? The opinion if it is a Brit asking is that Aussie’s are lazing on the beach most of the time and if it is an Aussie asking, they are convinced that those lazy Brits are too busy making tea to be doing real work.

Being the diplomatic bloke that I am, I typically respond that I have met Brits and Aussies that work stupidly long hours and that likewise there are plenty on both continents that seem to do very little work at all.

Now thanks to The Organisation for Economic Co-operation I have the answer.

Even though there is only an hour in it I will be sure to give it to those lazy Brits. Though the new question now, is how the Koreans found the time to respond to this survey?

via Steve Clayton – one of those Lazy Brits…

Energy Australia ad

This ad didn’t make me go to the Energy Australia Website, but it did make me laugh.

Seen at Kings Cross train station in Sydney.

Read the full details about the Beached Whale series on the ABC blog.

If you’re not familiar with the video watch it below. If you are familiar with it – watch it again anyways – you know you want to.

Choice bro.

As Trevor Young, one of the other speakers has highlighted on his blog, the biggest concern facing most attendees was fear of potential negative comments if they opened their brands/organisations up to social media. As such, the majority of conversations between myself (and the other speakers I spoke to) and the delegates revolved around ways to convince the boss that the old methods of broadcasting to audiences in a one way dialogue were quickly becoming less effective, and that for organisations to remain relevant they needed to engage in two way conversations between themselves and their audiences.

The conference was a fantastic welcome back for me into the Australian PR market. Beyond speaking with and meeting the delegates the event was a fantastic chance to meet in person, Trevor Young and David Park of Park Young, Liza Boston of Cracked Pepper, Leslie Nassar of Fake Steven Conroy fame, Paul Colgan from The Punch, Bronwen from Norg Media, Ross Monaghan from Deakin University, Sarah Stokely from Keep Left PR, Kate Kendall from Marketing Magazine, Steven Noble from Forrester and catch up with my old mate and ex colleague Graham White from Howorth Communications.

Below is a link to the slides I presented. For further information or my notes, don’t hesitate to get in contact via the comment section.

The video above is not short, it is 20 minutes, it also not that new either, having been delivered in 2006, but it is well worth watching. The speaker, Sir Ken Robinson is a leading thinker on realising the potential of creativity and the importance of innovation. The talk is incredibly funny verging on a comedy routine at times. The premise is that the current schooling system that trains children for the working world is an inadequate tool for preparing children to face the unknown challenges and opportunities that will happen into the future.

I liked the presentation and particularly related to the example he gives on why people are often discouraged from studying arts subjects like music. One of my favourite subjects at school was drama, but I was discouraged from continuing it beyond year 7 as it was unlikely I would ever find work as an actor. I’m not an actor today – even if I had pursued the subject it is highly unlikely I would have wanted to be an actor. But having a job that calls on me to present to and influence people constantly I often wonder how the skills I would have gained from further study in this area would have benefited.

Anyways enough about me – watch the video, it is entertaining. Hat tip Steve Clayton.

Pre and post moustache shave

One of my things is that whenever I am on holiday I grow a moustache. Today I shaved off my latest and most successful ‘tache – pre and post shots above. The ‘tache was four months in the making – not having shaved it since I left work on the 3 April this year. Like the all the other ‘taches there was some ceremony in the cutting off. I always take a photo, use a new razor blade and ensure Elizabeth is close by to kiss my shaven lip when it is done.

I used to grow the ‘tache for a bit of fun, but over time it has grown to mean more than a silly laugh. It acts as a physical reminder that I am not currently working. It reminds me to make the most of the time I have off and to do something that will sustain or enrich my life, because I will be back at work soon enough and won’t have the luxury of completely free time.

The trip Elizabeth and I recently concluded was the second travelling sabbatical I have taken during my professional career (the first being the trip I took with Elizabeth on our way to London that involved six months travel in South America) and I would be very surprised if it is the last.

But for now I am ready to return to the workforce. I feel refreshed, enthusiastic about the work I will be doing and have a head full of the type of ideas that simply don’t come in a hour long brainstorm (at least not to me). It is for these reasons that I encourage anybody that feels they are not sure where to take their career next, feel exhausted and jaded with work or have lost the work life balance battle to take some time off and go travelling. My career has not at all suffered from my time off.

So that is that. Tomorrow I will wake with an alarm, shower and iron a shirt and commute to the office. I want to thank all the loyal readers who have left comments and sent me kind messages about the stories and photos we have shared during our travels. The content on here will shift back to more of my professional thoughts and opinions now. For those who prefer the pretty pictures I still plan to post regularly, but I won’t be offended if you drop me from your RSS readers or unsubscribe from the email alerts.

Like my moustache, I will be curtailing my travelling desires for now, but the good thing is they will always come back.

Tuk tuk riding in Bangkok

GUEST POST – ELIZABETH DAWSON

After a simply marvellous month in China our final stop was to completely shift the scenery and pace with two weeks in Thailand.

Strangely for two Australians neither of us had ever been to Thailand before with brief stopovers in Bangkok airport on long haul flights our only contact with the place. Well, we are pleased to report this time we managed to get out of said airport to take a look around!

Basing ourselves in the Phra Nakhon area at the lovely, friendly Niras Bankoc hostel we were able to strike out on foot to visit all the key sites from the gorgeous Grand Palace and assorted wats, paying our respects to both the diminutive Emerald Buddha and the enormous Reclining Buddha on our way.

The Reclining Buddha upclose

Of course no backpacker trip to Bangkok is complete without doing a few laps of the infamous Khao San Road which seems to have the highest concentration of gap-year travellers in the world sucking back buckets of Sangsom and chucking back Changs like their lives depend on it.  Obviously I never did such things when I was their age…

Most afternoons we needed to retreat from the heat with a siesta at the hostel or in the massive shopping malls of Siam Square (or it seemed in taxis trying to negotiate the jammed Bangkok traffic).

By night we were spoilt for choice, one evening taking in some muay-thai /Thai boxing bouts at Ratchadamnoen stadium. Behind the cage in the cheap seats we still had a great view of the furious flurries of kicks and punches of the bare-foot boxers and enjoy the all the sound and spectacle of the crowd taking bets and cheering on their man.

Muy Thai action in Bangkok

The next evening after fishing out the cleanest and smartest duds from our backpacks (easier said than done at this late stage) we thought we might turn beer-o-clock into cocktail hour for once with a visit to the swanky Vertigo Bar at the Banyan Tree hotel. The 360 degree sunset view of Bangkok from this roof-top perch on the 61^st floor of the hotel is simply breathtaking.

Elizabeth at Vertigo Bar

Taking a tip from our hostel we then popped into the fairly underwhelming Suan Lum Night Bazaar for a kind of pesce-pedicure. We just sank our tootsies into a tank of little fish and they took it from there nibbling off all the dead skin. They had their work cut out for them with our feral feet but they did a damn fine job in the 20 minutes we let them run riot.

After all that serenity we thought it was time to seek out some seediness and peruse the lurid attractions of Patong and Soi Cowboy in Sukhumivit and see for ourselves the remarkable skill sets with which the ladies working in this area are blessed. Not places I will be going back to in a hurry but part of the Bangkok experience I guess.

Soi Cowboy, Bangkok

So that is our guide to spending four days in Bangkok. From Bangkok we headed south to the Gulf of Thailand coast islands of Koh Tao and Koh Samui for some lazy beach time and to dive deep below the waves. Once I manage to drag myself off the beach there will be a separate post for that.

All our Thailand images can be seen here.

Chinese flag

China is changing! And you don’t need to have been there more than once to know that. The presence of construction sites everywhere, the freshness of the metro systems in major cities and the fact our 2007 guidebook had a hard time keeping up with the new streets, buildings and ever increasing prices are all clear evidence. Everywhere you get a sense of vigour and purpose, of reinvention and creation and of a people incredibly excited that the great China dragon has arrived on the world scene and more importantly that the world is paying attention and looking to China. In my opinion the next 20-30 years belong to China. I just hope in some way I can grab onto one of the dragon’s scales and be taken along for the ride.

Elizabeth and I spent a month travelling in China, long enough only to see a fraction of what this vast land and enormous body of people have to show. It was an amazing experience; one that has left in us a determination to attempt to learn some Mandarin and to return soon. As with the other countries we have visited on this trip I have compiled a list of ten observations gleaned from the visit. As I always say, these observations are my own and may be wildly inaccurate, were obtained not speaking the language and have been made after visiting a fraction of the country for a short period of time. I welcome all comments and responses to this list and where appropriate am happy to make amendments or corrections.

So let’s begin:

1. Rapid pace of change – As I noted in the intro, China is changing and reinventing itself at an enormous rate of knots. There are construction sites everywhere. Today major cities exist where less than a decade ago stood sleepy villages, malls where only a few years ago vendors gathered at small market stands and highways everywhere are replacing dirt tracks. Of course you knew this, but one could not make a list of observations and not have this listed in the number 1 spot. From the people I spoke to I get the sense that this change is an incredible sense of pride, and who can blame them. Of course like with all emerging economies the flipside of all these changes is the risk of creating homogenised cities and towns and the loss of of traditional values in the race for modernisation.
2. Excessive sharing of saliva - as noted in the first point China is rapidly changing, but this does not mean that it is reshaping itself into a western country with all the western ways. Chinese customs and habits will no doubt remain a novelty and mystery to westerners for many years to come. The one that stood out most for me was spitting. The Chinese it seems are terribly afflicted by phlegm, so much so that they need to almost continually hock at it and spit it out regardless of their location. Spitting at a restaurant, whilst waiting in a crowded queue, whilst admiring a beautiful view or on the carpeted floor of a train are all fair game. Apparently in in the wake of SARS and in the lead up to the Olympics there was a big drive by the authorities to encourage the end of this practice though seems they have their work cut out for them. Quite disgusting for us, though I am sure the behaviour we exhibit, whilst perfectly normal in our society, is equally abhorrent to them.
3. Active old folk – forget the concept of retirement homes and wheel chairs, China’s old people act as though they are preparing for the 2012 Olympics. During the morning and evening hours parks, alleyways and quiet streets are besieged by old people stretching and hitting their muscles, practicing Tai Chi, using exercise equipment or even performing dance routines in groups of 50 or more. In the rural areas it is not unusual to see a senior cit hauling the huge piles of wood on their backs or toting laden carrying poles  to sell their wares in the villages.
   

   Elderly Naxi woman with laden carrying pole

4. Online and media censorship – being a fairly voracious consumer of the internet and online media, dealing with ye olde great firewall of china was a challenge to say the least. We were in China over the auspicious 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square masacre; Hotmail, BBC, Flickr, Twitter and likely many other other sites were blocked during this period. That is of course in addition to the sites that are constantly blocked like Youtube, Blogger, Wikipedia and WordPress.com (which hosts this blog). There are ways around it (as this post helpfully outlines) but this censorship and the absence of free media are highly questionable and in my opinion should be addressed if China wants to be truly recognised as a free world power.
5. Self awareness – perhaps it is due to the size of the population, or the legacy of a socialist society, but the Chinese appeared to be less focussed on the self/standing out. Joining in and being part of a larger group appears to still be the norm in the places we visited - it was amazing to see teenagers join middle aged and elderly people to dance in the parks without a hint of self-consciousness or need to look ‘cool’.
6. Friendliness – everywhere we visited people greeted us with friendliness, excused our language shortcomings and made allowances for our enormous level of  ignorance. I fear the reception the Chinese receive in Australia, or for that matter most western countries, is rather different.
7. Road rules – China is the nation where car ownership is growing fastest in the world (check and reference stat). Highways are springing up everywhere and the automobile seems to be the ultimate symbol of success. However, road rules haven’t kept adapted to this change. Overtaking on blind corners, driving on the wrong side of the road, or completely ignoring traffic lights and road signs are the norm. As more and more Chinese cars appear on the roads this will surely have to change if road tolls are not to rise exponentially.
8. Local tourism – tourism is big business in China and by far and away the biggest segment appears to be local tourism. As China’s middle class has grown so to has their desire to visit and appreciate their vast nation. Tourist locations like Lijiang, The Great Wall and the Yangshuo to name a few are inundated daily by tourist buses packed to the rafters with souvenir buying, SLR camera toting locals keen to have their photos taken in front of the sites and lap up the vast attractions of their country.
   

   Lugu Lake - a top Chinese tourist hotspot

9. Food – it is impossible to compile a list of observations about China and not mention the food. Not that this was unexpected, but the Chinese food available in western countries in many ways couldn’t be more different to the food available in China. Chilli and spices feature heavily making many dishes impossibly spicy (especially in Sichuan) for our western tongues. The etiquette also takes a little bit of getting your head around. It is good manners to leave food uneaten, so as to show the generosity of the host and not only is leaving an enormous mess over the table cloth and table ok it is thought strange if you do not.
   

   Sichuan hotpot - painfully spicy

10. No nappies – nappies (or diapers for any American readers out there) appear to be non existent in China. Instead children are dressed in crotchless trousers to make for an easy evacuation. I never quite worked out how the parents knew when the time was ripe for said evacuation, but what I did work out was how to move quickly out of the way when I saw a child, being carried in front delicately, like a cocked and loaded weapon, to the toilet.

With this post we have finished our China section of the trip. With my new job and China’s proximity to Australia I sincerely hope it will not be long before I am back.

For those interested all of our China images can be seen here.

Yulong River from Dragon Bridge

The pictures in this post I believe speak for themselves. For me they capture the quintessential image of China made familiar from ink drawings and Willow pattern china plates. They were taken in Guangxi province near the town of Yangshuo. They are images that were stolen between torrential monsoonal downpours, along small dirt tracks and on the river and whilst not wiping the sweat from my forehead.

Yangshuo was our last main stop in China. The end of a one month journey that had taken us across the country and afforded experiences not soon to be forgotten. It had been a place I had been looking forward to throughout our time in China, but unfortunately like that film all your mates have seen, loved and built up in your mind; Yangshuo for me was a bit of a let down.

One traveller we met midway through our time in China described Yangshuo as the most beautiful place she has ever visited. Online blogs proclaimed its charming backstreets and our Lonely Planet 2007 China edition described it as an place where people come for a few days, but stay for a week or more. However, the reality I found in mid 2009 was none of these. The place is now filled with tourist tat, annoyingly persistent hawkers and is the only place we experienced in China where people have actively tried to deceive us, or rip us off. All a bit of a disappointment; however, thankfully as the images show the surrounding country-side is still spectacular.

All up we spent three days and nights in Yangshuo. The first day was spent acclimatising to 35-40 Celcius temperatures and 85%+ humidity, not an easy task when you have spent the last three years or so living in London. The other two days were spent on or along the surrounding rivers riding bikes or bamboo rafting down the river marvelling at the magnificent limestone rock formations that rise skyward from the ground everywhere around the town.

The peaks are incredibly beautiful, especially when the fog rolls in around the towering peaks, but sadly for me in my mind it had been it was hyped up all a little too much. If you are reading this and planning to visit Yangshuo perhaps this post will help set your expectations low – you never know you might be pleasantly surprised when you arrive.

Some other pictures from our visit below. For all of our China images go here:

Moody skies along the Yulong River

Me at the Li River

Waiting for next bamboo raft passenger

Yulong River scarecrow

Our last week or so has been spent in China’s Yunnan province, a place consisting of mountains, villages and numerous Chinese ethnic minority groups. We made Lijiang, with its cobbled streets, fresh water streams, red lanterns and hordes of local tourists our base for exploring the more remote parts of the region and stayed at the wonderful Panba Guesthouse. We had a fascinating time in Yunnan and met some interesting folk and some real characters. Let me introduce you to a few:

Lijiang weaver

This fellow, whose name I didn’t catch, spends his days working the loom to make scarves that sit piled and neatly folded against one side of his ramshackle little shop located in a narrow street of Lijiang old town. With a cigarette constantly hanging from his lip, his wife and kid looking on from somewhere out the back and a steady stream of mates dropping by to play cards we figured he had it pretty sorted. His scarves were well funky and we couldn’t avoid weighing down our packs with a few samples to bring home.

Dr Ho

Dr Ho is a Chinese doctor who is world renowned for his healing powers. We met him in the tiny village Baisha, a bike ride outside of Lijiang. Western universities have certified that his therapies have had success in healing cancers like leukaemia and prostate cancer. He requires only the payment you can provide.

He called us in from the street, as he apparently does with all visitors to the town, to give us some tea and show us the press coverage that he has achieved, which is pretty impressive. NY Times articles, mentions in guide books Michael Palin has filmed him, but most impressive he has met Andrew Daddo!

Mosu woman

We met this lady as she skippered and directed our little row boat to the Liwubi Dao island of Lugu Hu (Lugu Lake). The two blokes you can see below were also on the boat, but, given they were all Mosu, there was no doubt given she was in charge.

The Mosu people, an ethnic minority that live around Lugu Lake, are believed to be the last society on the planet to live under matriarchal rule. The rules governing the matriarchal society mean that the local people never marry, but instead remain living in their maternal family homes and take many lovers throughout their life.

From around the age of 13, Mosu girls enter adulthood and are given their own room in the family home. Within this room they invite men back to share the night, but when the morning comes the blokes return to their mother’s home to help run the household and look after the children of their sisters. Likewise their own children are not their responsibility, but rather are looked after by their girlfriend’s brothers.
In addition to calling the shots when it comes to the hanky panky, Mosu homes are passed down the maternal line and all the big family decisions are approved by the family chief matriarch.

If you’re interested in reading more about the Mosu go here

Tommy

Tommy pictured here with Elizabeth is an enormous Danish gent we met whilst hiking the spectacular Tiger Leaping Gorge. Along with his travel buddy Meriem from France we spent the middle night of our Tiger Leaping Gorge trek at the basic, but blissfully empty Five Fingers guesthouse. An absolute hoot he had us laughing away our sore legs and altitude sickness throughout the night and into the next morning.

The Tiger Leaping Gorge where we met Tommy is one of the world’s deepest gorges and is home to a series of fast flowing rapids. The hike took about a day and a half through some sometimes incredibly steep and rocky terrain. The elevation made the going all the more hot and hard going – if our puffing and panting is anything to go on we need to renew our gym memberships ASAP upon our Sydney return.

Mr Altitude

Talking of elevation, after Tiger Leaping Gorge we headed north to the town of Shangri-la (also known as Zhongdian). At 3,200 metres above sea level, Elizabeth became well acquainted with our old friend Mr Altitude who loves to turn up with liberal doses of throbbing headaches and blurry vision. A visit to a Chinese medicine pharmacy with accompanying charades soon found a way to send him on his way.

Once acclimatised we were able to take in the sights of the principally Tibetan town including a turn on the extraordinary prayer wheel (the largest in China) and chow down a yak burger or two.

Where next?

I am writing this post sitting in the airport at Kunming after a night travelling from Lijiang by sleeper bus. Once our delayed flight finally boards we will be on our way to the picturesque towns of Guilin and Yangshuo to ride bikes around rice fields, watch boats gliding along the river and plenty else.

All of our China images can be seen here

Not only am I boring you, loyal readers, with my travel stories but as of last week select posts from this blog are appearing on the Lonely Planet website. Massively stoked!

My content is being syndicated as part of Lonely Planet’s new BlogSherpa programme that displays relevant blog posts against its own editorial content.

The BlogSherpa programme works by marrying the tags I add to my posts with similiar content on the Lonely Planet website. For instance posts that I have tagged with Kyrgyzstan appear on the Kyrgyzstan page. See below.

When people click through onto one of the links they are served my original post reproduced within the Lonely Planet environment. See below:

The interesting thing is, which you can see in the image, is that there are Google AdSense ads served alongside the post. In exchange for my content Lonely Planet passes all the revenue made from these ads directly onto me.

So far I have made the princely sum of $1.73 from people clicking on the ads. Not exactly the kind of earnings that will see me driving around in a Porsche anytime soon, but interesting none the less.

Kudos to Lonely Planet for recognising the value in partnering and working with bloggers to enhance its own content.

Feeding time at the Giant Panda Breeding Base, Chengdu

This post doesn’t need too many words, the little black and white fury fellas tend explain themselves and elicit ooohhh and aaahhs pretty well without them.

So I will keep it short. Given scientists studying pandas in the wild can go for years without actually seeing one we knew our best option for getting close to these lovely creatures was a visit to the Giant Panda Breeding Base, located in Chengdu in Sichuan Province. The breeding base is home to about 50 pandas and is the world’s most successful panda breeding centre.

I have some video that I will upload to YouTube when it is easier to do so, but for now I have uploaded a very short one. Fingers crossed this it works, though if not, enjoy the images.

This is the life

Panda blue steel

The bamboo flute

Panda job interview

There are a few ore on Flickr, which you can see here.

Elizabeth and I at the wall

Growing up in amongst giant bananas, guitars, cows and even clams one learns to appreciate things done on scale. Though long before the fibreglass model memories of my childhood, the Chinese were building them bigger, better and Buddha than ours.

As such, this post is dedicated to The Great Wall of China, The Terracotta Army and the grand sitting Buddha known as Dafo.

Great Wall

With rain falling, fog so thick we often couldn’t see much further than 15 metres ahead of us and with the stones beneath our feet scheming sliding incidents, we hiked the Jinshanling to Simatai section of the Great Wall.

History buffs can read about the section we hiked , but in short – what a feat of human engineering! The steep cliff-like hills the wall traverses and the sheer effort required to accomplish such an undertaking is truly staggering. Restored in some sections, you can appreciate what the wall looked like in its heyday, but it is the un-restored sections and the fact they have fared the 2,300 or so years since construction so well that is the truly remarkable thing. Our walk past 30 watchtowers and eight kilometres of the wall took roughly two hours. To walk the entire length of the 6,400 km wall would probably take around 320 days, assuming you cover 20km a day but our trip clearly didn’t allow for that kind of undertaking – next time maybe…

The wall through the fog

Terracotta Warriors

Teracotta archer upclose

Forget an open casket or ashes being scattered across the ocean, how about going out in the style of China’s first emperor Qing Shi Huang, with a few thousand individual soldiers to order around in the after-life.

The site, discovered in 1976 by a farmer digging a well, is astounding in its scale with more than 6,000 figures in the largest pit alone.

For the last 20 years all further excavation of the site has been halted while conservation technology can catch up to deliver better methods for the preservation of the artefacts. When first uncovered the figures were resplendently painted in bright colours though the air quickly oxidized the paint rendering the warriors the dull grey colour they are today.

Armed with new technology archaeologists are due now to recommence digs. Let’s hope they are successful.

Terracotta warrior with some colour on his collar

Grand Buddha Dafo

Dafo the Grand Buddha

The Grand Buddha of Leshan (known as ‘Dafo’) in Sichuan province is one of those historic sites where imagination is not really required. Upon entering the Dafo Temple grounds you can immediately feel his presence. Not surprising really given he takes up the whole side of a cliff and that even his fingernails are bigger than a standing human.

At 71 metres high (and he is seated) Dafo is the largest surviving Buddha in the world. A Buddhist Monk named Haitong began the massive undertaking of carving him around 713 AD, in the hope that the Buddha’s presence would calm the rough waters in front caused by three converging rivers. Well it worked. The rivers today converge in a relatively calm fashion; the surplus rock from the carving did the trick, though I like to think Dafo plays some part.

Dafo and his human sized finger nails

With panda images and video still up our sleeve, expect post soon, we are headed tonight by night train to Yunnan province and the town of Lijiang. As of today we have one month until we arrive back in Sydney. So we better make sure we make the most of it and get out there!

All of our China images can be seen here.

Old and new Kashgar

Kashgar, in the far west of China in the Xingjiang province was our first stop in China after crossing the Torugart Pass from Kyrgyzstan. The place was roughly 200km or so from Naryn in Kyrgyzstan, but in many ways we felt a million miles away.

Since the days of the Silk Road, Kashgar has been a market town where people of all different ethnicities, nationalities and religious persuasions came to buy and sell goods. Its massive Sunday livestock market is still today one of the biggest around. We unfortunately missed it by a day due the border being closed for the Dragon Boat Festival.

Located in an oasis and surrounded by furnace like desert regions, Kashgar is a strategic crossroad on the Silk Road and has from time in memoriam been the site of cultural conflict and cooperation. Today the local Muslim Uighur people (who look nothing like the typical image most westerners have of the Chinese – see below) live side by side with Han Chinese who are arriving en-masse from the more eastern provinces and a whole host of other minority groups.

It is easy to see that Kashgar is undergoing great change. Large sections of the old town are being levelled to make way for high-rise apartment buildings. But you can’t help but feel Kashgar has always adapted according to who was in charge at the time, or what goods have been available to sell. Sure there are more cars, mobile phone sellers and high-rise apartment blocks now, but as the picture above shows there is still plenty of the traditional Kashgar. Amongst the shiny new fast food stores are the sights and smells of the street side food vendors offering everything from smoky shish kebabs, pastries, watermelon and all manner of curious cuisine. Donkeys and scooters jostle for space on the old town alleys and there is no doubt that the hammering of copper bowls still drowns out the tinny music blaring obnoxiously from teenagers mobile phones.

As Lonely planet aptly says, “Kashgar was globalised before globalised was grammatical.” And the evolution continues.

We spent out our time in Kashgar soaking up the sun and walking around the bazaars and markets of the old and new town. Below are some of the pictures from our visit.

Market trader making noodles in Kashgar

Uighur men near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar

Watermelon trader in Kashgar

Kebab vendors

Elizabeth eating watermelon streetside

All of our China images can be seen here.

Sarala-Saz Jailoo

Yesterday as we drove from Naryn, Kyrgyzstan over the 3,752 metre Toruguart Pass into the Xingjiang province of China we bid farewell to Kyrgyzstan and in fact Central Asia. Thus as has been my tradition with the previous countries, this post is dedicated to our ten observations from Kyrgyzstan.

As I have said previously, when making observations about Turkey and Uzbekistan, these are merely my observations, drawn from a very short stay in a complex country, where I didn’t speak the language and only visited a handful of places. So needless to say they are not definitive.

1. Mountains – even a blind man couldn’t miss the mountains in Kyrgyzstan. They are spectacularly beautiful and a very welcome wake up jolt to our lazy flat-London leg muscles.

2. Russian influence – unlike Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan has retained many of the hallmarks of its Russian occupation. They Kyrgyz still use the Cyrillic alphabet (thankfully Elizabeth taught herself this so we could read things) and seem rather partial to lashings of vodka, which is scarily comparable in price to bottled water, is available in abundance. You could also be forgiven for thinking the USSR was still in existence given the number of Lenin statues and busts that litter the towns and cities.

3. Less obvious state control – unlike Uzbekistan, policemen were not a sight on every street corner, our accommodation each night did not need to be registered with the government and the internet appeared to be unfiltered and uncensored. That being said President Bakiev is figuratively omnipresent – peering out of the myriad billboards on the roadsides an in towns and villages.

Ever-watchful President Bakiyev

4. Community Based Tourism (CBT) – CBT is a nationwide network of community based tourism projects that marry westerners with local Kyrgyz families and communities. The scheme, whilst a little on the pricey side when compared with other options, is an excellent one and enables local people to continue to live their traditional (in some cases nomadic) lives whilst capitalising on the tourist dollar.

5. Beers with straws – ladies drink beer with a straw in Kyrgyzstan, something Elizabeth found simply too strange to comprehend.

Elizabeth never quite got used to drinking beer with a straw

6. Limited historic built environment – unlike the grand structures and monuments we encountered in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan had relatively few historical building or sights. I can only assume this is due to the fact that the Kyrgyz people were nomadic for much longer after the Uzbeks .

7. German cars – like used Japanese cars in New Zealand, it seems all of Germany’s used cars end up in Krygyzstan. Every second car it seems is an Audi 100 and there are also plenty of BMWs and VWs too.

Audi 100s are everywhere in Kyrgyzstan

8. Fabulous felt – from shyrdak rugs, the ak kalpak hats, to the covering of their yurts, the Kyrgyz people sure do know their felt. We were so impressed in fact that we bought ourselves a rug that we are currently trying to send home.

9. Young population – it seems everybody in Kyrgyzstan is young! There are kids everywhere and rarely do you see an aksakal (which directly translates to white beard). According to the UN children and teenagers (age 0-15) comprised 38.1 percent of the population in 1999 (National Statistical Committee 1999).

10. Cemeteries – It seemed that on the outskirts of every town there was a cemetery. Though don’t imagine some modest affair, they were often times massive, housing enormous tomb like monuments with sandblasted images of the deceased staring out at you. Interestingly many people performed a subtle Muslim blessing that looked as though they were washing their face when we travelled past a cemetery in a bus of shared taxi.

So with this post we have completed our tales of Central Asia. The region has been difficult travelling in many ways, with the fairly ordinary food and the fact that we forgot out Russian phrasebook being the two standout items. Both the countries we visited, though incredibly old in history, still feel like they are finding their feet after their Russian occupation. Though, if the pride and the determination of the people are anything to go by, this will change. The sights we have seen and the experiences gathered will be with us for a long time yet.

Posting this I am sitting using Wi-Fi (something that was for us non-existent in Central Asia) in Kashgar having just last night having potentially the best meal of our trip so far. The marvels and quirks of China lay ahead of us, so best get out amongst them.

All of the Kyrgyzstan images can be seen here.

Elizabeth and the yurt

So,Elizabeth has fulfilled one of her childhood ambitions of sleeping in a yurt. What is a yurt you ask? Why it is that funny looking shelter in the picture above. Traditionally the nomadic Kyrgyz people would live in these and move them to high ground in the summers and back down to the warmer valleys in the winter. Nowadays though it is typically only the shepherds who use them during summer as they tend their flocks on the jailoos (alpine grass plains).

The yurt is covered by sheep’s felt on the outside and decorated with shyrdak (felt) rugs on the inside. Complete with a fire, for burning sheep dung (don’t worry when burnt it is fully dried and not smelly), soft mats for sleeping on and a skylight to let in the light, it was a cosy little place for us to spend the night – it had to be, it was bloody freezing outside!

Over our stay we went horse riding and hiking around the hills up around the patches of remaining snow clinging on into summer. It was great to get a glimpse into family life up in the mountains – definitely a no frills way to live. We made a video and got some photos which hopefully paint a picture better than I can with words.

Our hosts Mr and Mrs Bobby

The yurt and our guard dog at dusk

I took this photo shortly before we retired for the night. The temperature was rapidly dropping, but the little fire burining dried sheep dung inside the yurt ensured we were cosy as we drifted off to sleep.

Elizabeth horse riding near the snow capped peaks of Sarala-Saz Jailoo

Horses on the Sarala-Saz Jailoo

The day following this shot all the foals were speperated from their mothers so that the mares could be milked to make kymys , a local low alcoholic drink. Like home brew in Aus, each household has their own take on it and everybody thinks their’s is best, so you have to try a few.

Mr Bobby's wife

Having been chased out of Kochkor as a result of my heavy internet using habits (long story), we are now back in Bishkek as we wait out the Chinese Dragon Boat festival and the reopening of the Torugart Pass. The next post, assuming all goes well, should be from western China!

View all our Kyrgyzstan images taken to date here .

Altyn Arashan Valley

A couple of days ago we hiked out of the alpine town of Karakol to Altyn Arashan, joined by Christine from the US who we met in town (and who gave us some awesome travel tips for China where she has been living for the last four years – thanks Christine!).

Given the elevation of the valley is 3,000 metres we were a little out of breath at the end of the hike, but the views the whole way were well worth it, as was the presence of hot springs at the top to ease those post-hike aching muscles! We spent the night in a home stay mountain lodge – definitely on the chilly side after sundown. After two and a half years living in the bright lights of London it was awesome to see a night sky carpeted with stars.

The place is beautiful and we were incredibly lucky to get such sunny, clear weather. Pics and video below:

Sunset in the Altyn Arashan Valley

Hiking in the Altyn Arashan Valley

Horses in the Altyn Arashan Valley

To view all our Kyrgyzstan images go here.

GUEST POST – BY ELIZABETH DAWSON

Our first stop across the border into Kyrgyzstan was a town called Osh. Nice place, worth a visit, only it was at least a ten hour drive north across two mountain ranges to our next stop – the capital city Bishkek.

We had sorted out our shared taxi through our hostel and we were all set for an early morning start. A quick dinner the night before in the standard local chaykana seemed the way to go – cheap and tasty. Alas, said dinner was less than gratefully received by Matthew’s digestive system and a rough night of technicolour yawns left us both fairly unsettled and Matthew still tres queasy come the morning. 

Still, the show must go on and into the car we got, ready for a full day on the road. Unfortunately the turn of the ignition was all the emetic that Matthew needed and within seconds of the car leaving the kerb the poor love’s stomach gave it up all over again (thankfully a plastic bag was on hand!). The driver and our fellow passenger were obviously intrigued at the speedy onset of travel sickness given we had barely moved a hundred metres.

We pressed on however and we were soon out in the lush, green landscape of the Kyrgyzstan side of the Fergana Valley. Snow capped peaks far off in the distance framed the view.

Our friendly driver rifled through his eclectic selection of cassette tapes to set the soundtrack for our road trip. He had a clear favourite that was played at least nine times over the course of the journey. Top highlights included 70s/ 80s classics such as Abracadabra, Woman in Love, a selection of Abba and aptly summing up our level of conversation with our road trip buddies – Words (Don’t Come Easy).

As well as mixing driving with DJ-ing the lovely man was always only to happy to stop for us to take photos and even pulled over to pick wild mulberries from the side of the road.

Our journey took us past a mirror-like turquoise lake reflecting the craggy wildflower covered mountains and alongside the Naryn River cut off by a series of massive Soviet dams.  Fresh mountain honey stands, trout sellers, grazing horses and scatterings of yurts were just some of the other sights to be seen from the window of the car as we climbed the twisty road.

Those distant snow capped peaks we saw at the beginning of the day got closer and closer until we were up at 3,184mt driving past glaciers surrounded by thick snow that buried car wrecks and huts. A 2.6km dark, dripping tunnel spat us out onto the other side of the mountain before we began our descent towards Bishkek.

We made it to the bottom of the mountain as dusk fell, the scenery now a strong contrast to the remote, rugged landscape of the past few hours. The long straight road towards the city was lined by factories, markets, houses and all the buzzing life that makes up a metropolis.

Eleven hours after leaving Osh we made it to our destination.  The road to Bishkek was also a road to recovery for Matthew who after a shaky start was in much better shape by the end of it all.

I am writing this post in the town of Karakol on the shores of Lake Issy-Köl from where we will be doing some hikes expect some pics soon.

Uzbek police officer in Samarkand – you are rarely far from one of these fellows anywhere in Uzbekistan

So in the tradition of the recent Turkey post, here are some of my top observations from our time in Uzbekistan. It should be said loudly and clearly that these observations should be taken with quite a few grains of salt. I don’t speak Uzbek or Russian, which no doubt would have altered the experience considerably. I also only spent two weeks in the country and I have only visited a handful of places.

That being said, we have enjoyed our time here in Uzbekistan immensely. We were nervous to say the least about the police presence and were expecting to be stopped regularly for passport checks and to be quizzed about our travels – though this only happened once and was a painless experience. We were also a bit wary of the cash situation with a dearth of ATMs and the subsequent need to carry wads of USD to exchange for bricks of Uzbek sum, but again this all seemed to be relatively painless. The ancient monuments and cities in Uzbekistan, as my previous post has highlighted, are spectacular and the people so friendly and accommodating. We even got an unexpected dose of Uzbek hospitality on our last night in the country in the city of Andijon where we were pulled off the street to join a massive wedding reception.

So without further ado let me observe:

1. Police – as per the caption under the image at the top of this post, you can’t help but notice the police in Uzbekistan. It would be fascinating to know the ratio of police to civilians  – they are everywhere.
2. Money – you certainly need to be cashed up in Uzbekistan – more in the literal sense than the figurative. You see, the biggest Uzbek note is roughly worth 60 cents, carrying the relatively small amount of $100 US was a unique challenge.
   

   Elizabeth with the equivalent of $100 US dollars

3. Food – carbs and fat aren’t hard to come by that’s for sure. Uzbeks are very proud of their national dish plov, an oily fired rice topped with poor cuts of meat, meat fat and tripe combined with strips of carrot and perhaps raisons – it tastes as good as it sounds. That being said we hardy starved and they must have some of the prettiest bread in the world.
4. Outdoor relaxation – not unique to Uzbekistan of course, but they certainly do have lounging al fresco sorted what with the cushy tapchans (tea beds), hidden leafy green courtyards and seemingly never ending pots of choy (tea).
5. Decoration – be it interior, exterior or personal decoration, Uzbekistan knows how to so it with colour, detail and splendour.
   

   Beautiful interior decoration at Mubinjon’s in Bukhara

6. Tashkent Metro – the Tashkent Metro stations are staggeringly beautiful. Each has its own look, from cathedral like arches, cosmonaut inspired space scenes or ballrooms with chandeliers – words cannot describe. Unfortunately for me, they were also designed to serve as nuclear bomb shelters, so taking photos is strictly forbidden.
7. Korea – in addition to large ethnic Korean communities across the country, Uzbekistan has a strong trading relationship with Korea. Uzbekistan sells uranium to Korea, the two countries are  both testing for oil and Korea has large Daewoo manufacturing plants based in the country (as evidenced by the extraordinary predominance of Damas, Nexias and little Matizes on the road)
8. ‘AYGEN Styled in Italy’ plastic bag – this random bag is absolutely everywhere in Uzbekistan and when I say everywhere I mean every second shop and every single stall owner at the bazaars were handing them out. I assume it was meant to say agency, but somebody stuffed up along the way and they sold the mistakes onto a large plastic bag distributor in Uzbekistan.  (PS – it seems these babies are also flourishing in Kyrgystan along with, randomly for our UK readers and Australian readers respectively Morrisons and Sportgirl bags)

   

   This shot was taken in Samarkand, but could have been anywhere that bags were being handed out

9. Hand on heart – accompanied by a gentle tilt of the head, this simple gesture of placing one’s right hand on on one’s heart is commonly used by Uzbeks to show thanks, acknowledge a compliment or in greeting. We even found ourselves doing it  – using it to express our feelings where our language failed us.
10. Grangos – when in South America we were on the Gringo Trail – gringo being the term used there to identify westerner tourists. But here, amongst hordes of empty nester travellers from Europe it felt at times like we were on the ‘Grango’ Trail.

Next we travel east to Kyrgyzstan where we expect to be hiking hills and around lakes, riding horses and fulfilling a lifelong dream of Elizabeth’s to sleep in a yurt.

We are now inKyrgyzstan and uploading images where and when we can, though connections tend to be slow.

For all our Uzbekistan images go here.