All posts in Travel technology

Travolution reports this week that ebookers, a subsidiary of Cendant Corporation, is currently having issues with Google. The reports are correct as the site www.ebookers.co.uk has been dropped from Google search results, with only six “supplemental” pages in the search engine.

The domain also appears to be slowly being removed from MSN and Yahoo and I have come to the conclusion that the removal of the pages must have been due to an error at ebookers, or they have requested the pages to be removed from the search engines through the robots.txt file.

Theory 1.

A supplemental page usually appears when a link to the page has disappeared and the Googlebot can no longer find the page on the domain. On Google you can ask them to remove all or part of your websites content, and they will do this within five days, providing that the necessary pages or folders are included on the robots.txt file

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Good news! You can now read travel rants on your travels – laying on Bondi beach in Sydney Australia, walking over the Great Wall of China, or whilst having breakfast with Mickey Mouse in Florida, USA.

Travel Rants has gone mobile – you can now read all of my blog entries via your mobile phone or PDA. Load up your browser on your WAP phone or PDA, and type in the normal website address, and taa daa read the blog with images, and never miss a thing – its not been tested on every browser and phone so let me know if you have any problems! Have fun!

Edit:

News just in that the blog has been featured in both the San Antonio and Austin American Stateman newspapers this week for my blog guide to Prague. This is great news for the blog, as it’s further increased the number of readers in the US.

I’m having an interview with a reporter from Sydney Morning Herald next about how technology and the internet has changed travel .. then it’s next stop New York Times! Anyone else want to interview me?

Travel companies promoting tourist attractions will soon be able to offer 3D virtual reality tours on the Internet thanks to Microsoft’s prototype technology, called Photosynth. Companies will be able to take a series of photos and use these to create a virtual tour that could be accessed over the Internet.

Holiday brochures are reported to be slowly becoming replaced by online videos and guides, so could the introduction of Photosynth, see the holiday brochure extinct quicker than expected – time will tell.

It looks a really exciting product from Microsoft’s Live Labs that takes a collection of pictures and creates a three-dimensional space for them by analysing the images and looking for similarities.

For a preview of Photosynth visit the Microsoft Live Labs website.