Travel and places

Yearly travelogue with photos and stories.

2008 Beijing, Andorra, Belgium, Granada ... (English and Spanish)
2007 San Francisco, Banff, Warsaw, Netherlands ... (English and Spanish)	2006 Assisi, Paderborn, Hong Kong ... (English and Spanish)	2005 Barcelona, Santiago de Compostella, Tokyo ... (English summary)
2004 Barcelona, Venecia, Pisa, Roma ... (Spanish only)	2003 Melbourne, Sydney, Manila ... (Spanish only)	2002 Lisboa, Barcelona, Paris, Holanda ... (Spanish only)

In the year 2008, for the first time in history there is more people living in cities than in rural areas. The number of people living in slums is expected to exceed 1,000,000,000 very soon. The Places We Live by Jonas Bendisksen is an interactive art project that documents life in 4 slums in the cities of Venezuela, India, Jakarta and Nairobi, including photos, interviews and 360-degrees panoramas of people showing their homes.

I was puzzled in Amberes when I saw this musician in the street playing this weird instrument. It has strings and it is played like a violin, but it has a kind of amplifier like a trumpet.

Do you know which instrument is this?

Today I was playing with a few social networking applications that offer location services. Why? I want to stop posting only cryptic status messages in Facebook and sometimes really say what am I doing as my friends do (real friends, not only facebook friends), plus I also want to post some location information in my profile and keep track of trips.

One of the most important features to me was compatibility with FireEagle, which is a broker of location information to be used by other applications and social networking sites, that will give me a low entry/exit barrier. I also wanted something that can write to my Facebook profile, as I use Facebook a lot. The resulting setting was a non-trivial data flow that I had to draw to understand:

There are a few sites that are designed to handle location information in a social networking setting. The one I liked the most, from the ones I visited, is Dopplr which is a place for frequent travellers to boast about how many places they have been and where are they going next. Dopplr can read/write from FireEagle and has a nice application for Facebook. The Dopplr site is also pretty neat, I must say, and the Raumzeitgeist has a very cool look.

In April I went to Beijing, China, to the WWW 2008 conference.

We also had time for sightseeing, for instance we went to see a part of the Great Wall, and we went to the most famous places such as the Forbidden City or Tiananmen Square. Beijing is a large, dense and polluted city with impossible traffic conditions, in which you can find thousands of interesting places and images. Link >>