The new hotelicopter review platform is now live! Our new system lets you:

- post your reviews to your facebook news feed
- review a hotel from any place hotels appear on our site
- see when your Facebook friends have reviewed hotels in your search results

If you want to start rating hotels on hotelicopter, simply conduct a search from our home page and click “Add Rating” on the hotel you wish to review.

We are the first major travel site to provide full integration with Facebook for sharing hotel reviews.

We believe our new hotel review platform will make it even easier to use hotelicopter to find the perfect hotel at the best available price!

If you’re one of our original users from the VibeAgent days, you’ll be receiving an email shortly with a link to your account where you’ll find all your old hotel reviews available in our new format!

You can read our official press release here: hotel ratings live on hotelicopter.

The following is the story of how hotelicopter punk’d the Internet for fame and profit.

I’ve just returned from the EyeforTravel Marketing Conference in Miami, where I presented The Anatomy of a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign (the story behind our new brand launch) to many of the leading marketers in our industry. I was pleased to see that the new brand for our hotel search engine, launched a month earlier for only $3,000, had about 70% brand recognition within the audience.

In case you missed it, we launched a viral marketing campaign on March 27th based on a fictional flying hotel. You can still view the April Fool’s Day web site here and the video here.

As many of you already know, we decided to change our name and our brand because VibeAgent (our previous name) did not accurately represent our new positioning as a hotel search engine. We were looking for a new brand that a) related to hotels; b) was fun and social; c) was memorable; and d) provided us some SEO lift for the word “hotel”.

So after much brainstorming, we decided on hotelicopter. The name clearly relates to hotels, is fun, memorable, and gives the Google bots some red meat to chew on.

Our newly rebranded and redesigned site is the first major travel site to utilize Facebook Connect as its user system. This means that users can create an account on hotelicopter simply using their Facebook account credentials and instantly have their Facebook and hotelicopter accounts linked to each other. No need to recreate your social network either - it travels with you from Facebook to hotelicopter. We’ve also integrated TripAdvisor hotel reviews and many improvements to the user flow and feature set on our new site.

As we were scheduled to launch hotelicopter.com April 8th, we found ourselves in the fortunate position of launching a new brand based on a fictional flying hotel right after April Fool’s Day. Our launch campaign practically created itself: we would bring a flying hotel to life as an April Fool’s Day prank to build pre-launch buzz and drive inbound links to our new domain name. The Hotelicopter was born.

Mil-V12

The largest helicopter in the world is the Mil-V12, a Russian-made vehicle created in the 1950’s of which only two were ever made. If we were going to create a plausible flying hotel it had to be big. The Mil-V12 provided the perfect inspiration. We simply added an extra floor to house the Hotelicopter’s 18 luxurious rooms, yoga studio, art gallery, and koi pond - and four GE turbo-thrusters to provide the power necessary to lift and transport the extra weight.

The Hotelicopter

Once we had an idea of what our flying hotel would look like, we turned to the talented designers at PerspectX to create a 3D model of the Hotelicopter and make it come to life, and the equally talented Aidan Keith-Hynes at Starlight Productions to do the post-production work on the raw footage. We called Yotel, the English-based airport hotel chain, and asked if we could have permission to publish photos of their hotel rooms on our site and credit them with designing the interior of the Hotelicopter, and they agreed. We put a web site together in-house using a free WordPress template, and created a press release of Hotelicopter’s launch that was downloadable from the site (we did not, however, push our fictitious press release out over the wires, as we felt that would be crossing an ethical boundary). With a web site, photos, video, and a press release, we were armed with the content we needed to launch our campaign.

The next step was to build out the distribution network. This consisted of setting up accounts with the usual suspects - YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter - and providing visitors to our April Fool’s Day web site easy links to watch our video, join our fan page, and follow us in the twittersphere. We complemented these three communities by posting our high resolution video on Vimeo and posting our Hotelicopter photos on Flickr.

With the content and distribution networks in place, it was time to strike the match. That’s when the social news and bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Reddit came in. Each of these channels provided us access to unique audiences of early adopters, or to coin Malcolm Gladwell’s terms from The Tipping Point: Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople.

With this campaign, our hook was simple: “Wow, check out the world’s first flying hotel!” Within a few hours of posting a few hooks, we caught our first big fish.

Measuring Campaign Buzz

Gizmodo, the top ten blog focused on consumer technology, posted at 6:20pm on Friday, March 27th about the Hotelicopter after being tipped off by a loyal reader (Kyle Redinger, the owner of the media site Cvillain - thanks Kyle!), and mayhem ensued. We had decided to host our April Fool’s Day web site at GoDaddy under a basic account, and our site was quickly brought to its knees from the ensuing traffic. We quickly upgraded our account to handle the extra load, but for several hours people had a hard time reaching our web site to learn more about the world’s first flying hotel. In hindsight, this may simply have contributed to the buzz - 130 people posted comments to the Gizmodo blog entry, with the general gist of the conversation revolving around the questionable veracity of this new vehicle.

Once Gizmodo posted their story, hundreds of amateur bloggers had an interesting story to post about and the visual candy to support it, and inbound links to www.hotelicopter.com started piling up. This grassroots momentum kept site traffic and buzz going at a steady rate for the next three days, catalyzed by celebrity tweets from David Pogue of The New York Times and Guy Kawasaki of AllTop.com and the perennial Internet conference circuit. Gizmodo’s post was followed up three days later, on March 30th, by sister site Engadget, the third most heavily-trafficked blog online. Again, the post was fairly straightforward, discussing the Hotelicopter as if it were real, albeit somewhat aerodynamically ill-conceived.

But this time, only two days before April Fool’s Day, readers dug a little deeper into the story and started calling Engadget out in the comments section for getting “punk’d” by The Hotelicopter. In a surprising move, Engadget actually pulled the post completely from their web site that night, most likely prompted by Gizmodo’s retraction post earlier in the day entitled The Hotelicopter Outed as a Fake. And Wired magazine posted an uppity blog post entitled Hotelicopter Hoax Flies Over Bloggers’ Heads - ironically it turned out - about how lame the other big blogs were to get punk’d by The Hotelicopter, even though they themselves incorrectly credited the source of the hoax and botched their fact-checking about the actual Russian Mil-V12 helicopter (which they were quickly taken to task for by their readers in the comments section).

Web Site Page Views

However, the story was far from dead. While Gizmodo, Wired and Boing-Boing were declaring The Hotelicopter a sham and incorrectly crediting Yotel with a “brilliant hoax,” plenty of people - the vast majority in fact - still believed The Hotelicopter to be real, discovering it on our web site, an amateur blog, or YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, or one of the many social bookmarking and news sites that were helping spread the word about our flying hotel. During all this we were tickled pink, as you can probably imagine, as the goal of our campaign was to generate buzz and inbound links to our site, and the growing controversy about the veracity of our flying concoction was helping drive both beyond our wildest expectations.

Over this period of time, our YouTube video became the most popular video in the Travel category, and ultimately one of the 25 most-viewed videos for the week. Another thing that truly amazed us during this time was the geographic distribution of our site traffic. In the four days between our site launch and April Fool’s Day, the top five cities driving traffic to our site were New York, London, Moscow, Amsterdam, and Budapest. The Russians were eating it up! We weren’t sure if they were confused as hell or laughing their asses off.

Between Engadget’s post and April Fool’s Day we were averaging between 4,000 and 8,000 visits, and about 20 to 40 tweets, an hour. And except for a miniscule pay-per-click advertising campaign placed on Facebook, this was a completely viral campaign. It was being driven entirely by the online community.

Geographic Distribution of Web Traffic

On Wednesday, April 1st, our campaign reached its climax. We woke up that morning to a big article in The Telegraph, one of the biggest newspapers in the UK: Millions of web users fall for hotelicopter April Fool. The Huffington Post, the most heavily-trafficked blog online, featured us in their post about Best April Fool’s Day Pranks and linked to our video. Ryan Seacrest and Kanye West featured us on their personal blogs. We were featured on Daily Candy’s web site and in their popular email newsletter. We were even called by The Today Show the evening before and told we were going to be featured on their April Fool’s Day segment, but were ultimately bumped by the controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s choice of a birthday gift to the Queen of England (an iPod, of course).

On April 1st, 300,000 people visited our site, and over 150,000 watched our video on YouTube. Countless more learned about The Hotelicopter from another site or a friend that had read about it online. As the day came to a close, we moved the April Fool’s Day site from www.hotelicopter.com into the subdirectory aprilfools.hotelicopter.com, and launched the hotelicopter splash screen in its place. We wanted to continue the sense of mystery surrounding hotelicopter, and leverage all the buzz towards the launch of our new hotel search engine on April 8th. So we created a countdown on the page, and directed people to sign up via Facebook, twitter, or email to be notified with the “real” hotelicopter went live.

hotelicopter splash screen

While traffic and buzz died down considerably after April 1st, there was still a low rumbling in the blogosphere and twitterverse about The Hotelicopter, and some discussion as to what it could be if it wasn’t a flying hotel. In retrospect, we might have been even better served if we had been able to launch our hotel search engine on April 2nd, but our technology team was working miracles as it was to accelerate our launch forward a week from our previous plans, and it simply wasn’t possible. That being said, we continued to attract those inbound links that are ever so important in building page rank on search engines, and we now had a secret we couldn’t wait to share with the world.

On April 8th, hotelicopter (the search engine) went live, and was immediately picked up by TechCrunch - One Brilliant Hoax Later, Hotelicopter Joins the Hotel Aggregation Fray and CNet - Hotelicopter is Real, Though Simply A Hotel Search Engine. Site traffic was comparable to that for April 1st. And when Google finally assigned us a Page Rank of 6 at the end of May (VibeAgent had been a 5), we knew our objective had been fulfilled. In the final accounting, our viral campaign generated 1.1 million page views, 500,000 video views, lots of great buzz and media coverage, a solid page rank for a brand new domain, new friends and followers, and perhaps most importantly of all, a great story to share with all of you that hopefully brings a smile to your face.

In a bit of a footnote to this story, the best reporting on our fictitious flying hotel was found on Snopes.com, the site that determines the veracity of all things. On April 23rd, they came out with the verdict on The Hotelicopter with this lead-in:

Some April Fool’s pranks are so good they continue to circulate and ensnare the unsuspecting long after April 1 has come and gone. The Hotelicopter hoax is another such example.

So with this blog post, I hope we can finally put this prank to bed. We continue to get emails from journalists and travel enthusiasts, primarily from the Middle East, Asia, and South America where they don’t celebrate April Fools Day, asking about The Hotelicopter and how they can book a flight or feature it in their luxury magazine. My answer to all of you out there still looking for a flying hotel is this: you might just find one if you search long and hard enough on www.hotelicopter.com, our hotel search engine…

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a post about how Charlottesville, Virginia (where VibeAgent is headquartered) has many of the essential ingredients to becoming a successful breeding ground for technology startups. We’re home to Mr. Jefferson’s University, and we have lovely weather, a robust live music scene, fancy art galleries, access to world-class parks, beautiful vineyards, free polo matches on Sundays, plenty of rich and famous people, and fantastic coffee and coffee shops; basically, we’ve just got an all-around high quality of life over here.

The only challenge of building a world-class technology business in this great place I alluded to in 2007 was the fact that we needed more nerds. Specifically at VibeAgent, we need more people who understand the web and can build, market and deploy great software. I referenced Paul Graham’s fantastic essay on why Silicon Valley is so good at producing successful technology startups. My post catalyzed an even more interesting discussion over on the OpenSource Connections blog, a talented software development shop also based in Charlottesville. And in personal conversations with Daniel Strickland over at Cloudbrain, Jeff Gunther at Intalgent, Eric Pugh at OpenSource, Otavio Freire at OpenQ, and others, we’ve developed a consensus on one thing - we all want more nerds!

Well, since that post, VibeAgent has grown to 14 people, moved to shiny new offices on the beautiful downtown mall, been covered twice each in TechCrunch, USA Today, and MSNBC, been named a top up-and-coming travel site in the Washington Post and on Forbes.com, and been featured just this last week in our own local paper, the Daily Progress. We’re about to make a major financing announcement, a major partner announcement, and roll out two major software releases. (/blatant self-promotion)

But…..our biggest challenge continues to be finding good technology people, and Charlottesville still needs more nerds. We would hire five talented developers tomorrow if we could find them locally, but so far, we haven’t. And this is forcing us to consider other options for our business, including opening up an office somewhere more nerdy.

So, with a little more experience under our belts, I’d like to put forth five concrete proposals on how technology firms in Charlottesville like VibeAgent can band together to gain some critical mass and solve the #1 challenge facing our business. We love this town, and we’d rather not have to go elsewhere to satisfy our nerd quotient.

How to Strengthen the Charlottesville Technology Community

1. Create an Active Charlottesville Technology Networking Club
Real world social networking is essential to creating strong bonds and gaining critical mass. I’ve set up a group using Cloudbrain’s blastogo to form an sms network for a monthly CvilleNerd meet & greet (if you want to join the sms network and be notified of the time and location of our first event, simply text “follow cvillenerd” to 32075). The idea here is to have a monthly social event to start making more connections and strengthening the Charlottesville technology ecosystem. I’m hoping the active members of Neon Guild and Chuug will join this list, along with all of us who work in the online world here in Charlottesville, and we can start to develop some critical mass.

As this club grows organically, we can create a web site and job board, form groups on existing social networks, and provide a way for Charlottesville technology companies and technology people to get to know each other better in an informal setting. But it takes that first step, so join CvilleNerd today.

2. Develop Stronger Ties to UVA’s Engineering & Applied Sciences Schools
There are a myriad of opportunities for strengthening relationships between the local technology business community and UVA’s leading technology and applied sciences programs. Career fairs, speaking engagements, case studies, internships, school projects, and other activities help build stronger bonds between the worlds of academia and business.

The need here is for a common touch point for Charlottesville technology businesses, and a desire by the University to support the local community. The City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County can also develop programs to stimulate mutually beneficial collaboration between UVA and Charlottesville’s business community. A strong local economy provides more job opportunities for families who relocate here, and increases demand for Charlottesville’s existing businesses. We can all do more to strengthen these ties, and with the development of CvilleNerd, we will.

3. Establish More Continuing Education Options in Applied Technologies
Charlottesville employees need more continuing education options to help them stay current on new technologies, starting with training courses in programming languages such as PHP, Java, C++, and Ruby, as well as in advanced project management methodologies and tools. UVA and Piedmont have practically no curriculum options for these types of classes. With a common organizing body to aggregate demand for and promote the desire for more technology education programs, our goal should be to attract better teaching resources to both of these institutions, and/or develop our own training programs and make them accessible and affordable for our community. Just as America needs to focus on re-training our work force for the new competitive global landscape, Charlottesville needs to invest in training programs for our technology community. The economic future of our city will be driven by our ability to attract, train, and retain the knowledge workers that are increasingly the driving force behind our continued economic prosperity.

4. Actively Market Charlottesville as a Great Home for Startups
Many of you are already familiar with the Aspen vs. Austin conversation. Will Charlottesville become a community with a strong university, arts programs, and a thriving middle class - like Austin - or will it go the direction of Aspen, another city known for its beautiful surroundings and high quality of life, but that has become too expensive to support a middle class and instead caters to retirees and the superrich? The choice, put in these terms, is clear. The outcome, however, is not.

Charlottesville needs to redouble its efforts to market itself as a great place for small businesses, especially in the technology fields, and to promote policies and investments that successfully support small businesses growth. The downtown mall is a vibrant place where lunch time means bumping into colleagues from other companies and strengthening the bonds that create community. I envision a time when the mall is littered with high-tech startups tackling exciting business challenges and simultaneously supporting the local economy. These things have a tipping point, a phenomenon well documented in Malcolm Gladwell’s book of the same name. We just need to give it a little push.

5. Share Charlottesville’s Technology Startup Success Stories
When you say the words “dot-com startup” to people who have lived in Charlottesville for over 10 years they immediately recall Value America. The company actually relocated from Nevada to Charlottesville in 1998 and went public in April 1999, gaining a valuation of $2.4 billion without a dime in profits. But a little over a year later, the firm had filed for bankruptcy and quickly became a “dot-bomb.”

Those days of irresponsible excess and greed are over. Businesses today have a much higher hurdle to reach before being showered with venture capital. The markets have also become wiser, and are valuing businesses based on their fundamentals once again. A lot of the entrepreneurs that are starting businesses today actually founded businesses and raised venture capital during the bubble days (myself included) and have learned a lot from the experience. There are also significant structural improvements in the web environment that make it far easier to get a startup successfully off the ground these days. They primarily relate to the ability today to a) tap into existing revenue streams in the form of advertising networks such as Google AdSense; b) tap into existing online communities and user bases such as Facebook and MySpace; and c) roll out software and hardware infrastructure at costs approaching zero by leveraging open source software and elastic computing clouds.

So, there are many new Internet success stories out there, and we hope to be one of them. Let’s share the good news, the best practices, the key takeaways that we discover in our collective startup experiences, through face-to-face networking and aggregating our online worlds.

We here at VibeAgent look forward to supporting the development of a more robust and cohesive technology community in Charlottesville. Because, together we can build something much greater than the sum of our individual efforts.

Together, we can create a little Silicon Valley of the south.

(VibeAgent is focused on providing you the biggest selection of hotels and the best travel deals.)

Today VibeAgent is relaunching its site as a Hotel Search Engine.

Our relaunch today is focused on making VibeAgent.com the #1 destination online to help you research and book hotels.

You’ll find the entire process of searching for a hotel room on our site greatly streamlined. We hope you’ll try it out and share this discovery with all your friends!

Entering Your Initial Search

If you’re doing a non-dated search, simply enter your location and go! If you want to further refine your search results, you can enter dates, your desired vibe, rooms/guests, even the specific hotel you are looking for or the currency in which you’d like to see rates.

You’ll find the font size for the location field larger for your viewing pleasure, and we’ve also significantly sped up our autocomplete.

We believe our new and improved calendar is the best online, anywhere, period.

Our double month view means you don’t have to scroll from month to month. You can even click on your check-in date, and then slide your mouse to your check-out date, making the date selection process super smooth. The calendar automatically closes after you’ve selected your check-out date.

Adding Your Hotel Vibe

To help you find the perfect hotel for your needs, click the button “Add Tags” to select the ambience, activities, and the type of guests the hotel is known for. You can select as few or as many tags as you want - we’ll use your requests to help filter and order your search results.

Adding Your Desired Location

Location is one of the most important criteria people use when making a hotel booking decision. VibeAgent’s unique location filter is the best in the business. For larger cities, you can choose to whittle down your search results to specific neighborhoods. You can also create a customized location filter - moving the borders of your search area wherever you want. You can even do this after you’ve gotten your initial search results and the search results will update in real time. Use this feature to narrow down your Manhattan hotel search, for example, to a specific city block.

Filtering Your Search Results

VibeAgent provides robust filters to help you narrow down your hotel search results in real-time so you can be sure you’re looking at the best hotels for your needs. These include a price filter, a star rating filter, a loyalty program filter, and an amenity filter. Do you want to stay in a hotel between $150 and $180 that is in the Hilton chain and has a pool and free breakfast? No problem! Let VibeAgent’s filters help you narrow down your hotel options accordingly; simply use your mouse to adjust the slider bars or check the boxes and your results will update instantly.


Comparing Your Rate Options

VibeAgent now parses the different room types that you can book, and shows you on the hotel’s room rates page the best rate for each room type in a summary view. Of course, to see other room rate options, you can expand each box by clicking on the “See all rates for this room type” link and the page will instantly expand to show you all of your available options. You can also filter this page by specific provider (e.g. Priceline or Hotels.com) if you only want to see rates from your favorite booking channel.

Navigating the Community Features

Finally, we’ve streamlined the main navigation on VibeAgent so it’s easier to find what you’re looking for quickly. We hope you find the new and improved VibeAgent.com site makes it even easier to find great hotels at the best available rates, and we look forward to servicing all your future hotel searches!

We get asked here four or five times a day, “So why should I use VibeAgent instead of, say, Orbitz or Expedia?”

I guess the answer to that question is so obvious to those of us that work in online travel, because we understand the intricacies of how the industry works.

But to you, the everyday traveler, this might not be so obvious. You just want to stay in a great hotel at the best available rate. And who can blame you! Why pay more than the guy down the hall staying in the same room?!

So, give me a few minutes of your time to lay out the case for Hotel Meta-Search. Keep reading, and I promise that what you’ll learn will save you thousands of dollars in hotel room fees, and make each and every one of your future hotel stays significantly more enjoyable.

VibeAgent searches each of our partner sites every time you use our site. This provides you with five major benefits, which I detail further below. They include: price; selection; room availability; time; and personalized recommendations.

PRICE
Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Hotels.com, Priceline - each of these sites are what is called an Online Travel Agency, or OTA. Each OTA goes out and signs agreements directly with hotels and hotel chains to distribute their inventory on the OTA’s site. They each negotiate their commissions and specific agreements separately.

There are lots and lots of OTAs out there. You’ve probably heard of the brands I just listed, but you might not have heard of smaller niche OTAs such as TravelWorm or Agoda or Skoosh. Some of these smaller niche OTAs focus on specific hotel segments, such as independent hotels, or luxury hotels, or hotels in Las Vegas or Asia. Because they specialize, they can often negotiate even better rates for some types of hotels than the larger, more recognized OTA brands.

Also, there are two major room types in the industry; Net Rate rooms, and GDS (Global Distribution System) rooms. Net Rate rooms are negotiated specifically between the OTA and the hotel supplier. They vary from site to site. GDS rooms are rooms that are distributed via the big global distribution systems such as Sabre and Amedeus, and each OTA has access to the same rates.

So, one OTA may have negotiated a customized agreement - a Net Rate - directly with a specific hotel, whereas another OTA only has access to that hotel’s GDS room rates. In addition, an OTA may negotiate access to a specific room type (say, suites), or last minute rooms, or rooms on specific dates, etc., whereas another OTA doesn’t have the same agreement.

The bottom line is, there are lots of reasons why one OTA’s rates for a particular hotel may be different than another OTA’s rates for the same hotel. So, why would you want to risk booking a room from one OTA, when you might be able to get a better rate on the same exact room from another OTA?

Enter the direct booking channel. One thing you don’t find on OTA sites is the ability to book directly with the hotel’s web site. As hoteliers increasingly seek to have customers book directly through them, this is becoming a more competitive channel for consumers. At VibeAgent, we’ve partnered with many of the leading hotel chains, and continue to develop new relationships. We hope to be able to provide a direct booking channel to a significant percentage of our 150,000 by the end of this year. If you’re a hotelier looking to list yourself on our search engine, click the For Hoteliers link at the bottom of our site.

Because VibeAgent searches over 30 leading travel sites every time you use our site, we can show you rates from multiple OTAs for the same hotel all on one page. The rates you see on VibeAgent are the exact rates you’d find if you searched each of our partners’ sites directly. So, by using VibeAgent’s hotel search you can be sure you’re getting the best price for the room that you’re going to book.

SELECTION
But it’s not just about pricing. Our largest partner has rates and availability for about 65,000 hotels. Because VibeAgent aggregates rates and availability from over 30 partner sites, we actually can show you rates and availability for over 150,000 hotels, more than twice as many hotels as our largest booking partner!

Remember, some of the OTAs we’ve partnered with focus on specific niches, like hotels in Las Vegas or Europe or Asia or high-end hotels or independent hotels. So when you search on VibeAgent, you’ll gain access to a much larger selection of hotels than you would searching any of our partners’ sites individually.

ROOM AVAILABILITY
As we discussed earlier, there are two major room types; GDS rooms and Net Rate rooms. While GDS rooms are centrally distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis, Net Rate rooms are distributed according to the individual agreements negotiated between an OTA and the hotel supplier. So, during busy periods, it is possible that a hotel’s GDS inventory is sold out, while a specific OTA still has availability through their Net Rate rooms. Using VibeAgent, a hotel is more likely to have availability than if you searched our partners’ sites individually.

TIME
Your time is valuable, and we know that! How long would it take you to search each of our partners’ sites individually to find the perfect hotel at the best available rate? Hours! In fact, the average travel consumer visits 4 to 10 sites every time they are looking for a hotel room.

VibeAgent’s proprietary meta-search technology and matching algorithm solves this problem by searching our partner sites and integrating their rates and availability all in one place, so you only have to come to one site - VibeAgent.com!

PERSONALIZED RECOMMENDATIONS
Finally, here’s an advantage that’s unique to VibeAgent. You can register on our site, and then post and share hotel reviews with your friends. We’ll keep track of your hotel preferences, and your friends’ hotel preferences, and integrate these social recommendations in how we display your hotel search results. So, if a friend of yours highly recommends a hotel in Paris, the next time do a search on VibeAgent for Paris, the hotel your friend recommends will appear at the top of the list of results along with a direct link to their hotel review.

Using VibeAgent, you can also tag your ideal hotel experience (e.g. Romantic, Stylish hotel with a Spa) and we’ll prioritize your search results accordingly. This way you can be sure you’re staying in the perfect hotel for you.

So, in conclusion, why wouldn’t you use VibeAgent for all your hotel searches? We hope you’ll think of us the next time you’re researching or booking a hotel room online, and feel free to help us spread the word.

If you’re like most online veterans, you probably like buying domain names for fun and profit. I know I do. I’ve been doing it for about twelve years now.

But it was not until very recently, as in about like 10 minutes ago, that i realized this: how I end up buying domain names is probably very different than the way you do. Read on, and then if you want you can share your opinions in favor or to the contrary in the comments, or win a shiny new domain name.

That is, if you’re a real a person and not some robot spider sent by Google.

Many of us buy a domain name because we think somebody else might want it later, or perhaps somebody forgot to do something obvious, like register their own name or company or slogan or whatever.

I guess I might do that sometimes. But that’s usually when the domain name doesn’t end up being worth much.

I usually come at the whole domain thing a little differently. Usually when I decide to buy a domain name it is because there’s that semblance of a seemingly marketable idea bouncing around my head and I think I might as well go ahead and buy a little insurance policy on that idea. Like a $10 policy. $50 if i want the 5 year one.

Who knows, maybe it was a great idea. Maybe in 4 or 7 or 10 years I’ll circle back to that idea and think; right time, right place. Let’s do this. Or you will. No worries, you can have it. If it is the right time, right place for you, then I would be happy to contribute to that. Redirect and transfer!

Then I will have given someone a present while having a new story to tell…for $10 - what a bargain!

So here’s a little sample of five particular gems i’m sitting on right now. If you have a good idea for using one of these things, tell me below. If I like it, the domain is yours, free. My call.

feedbreaker.com
pillowbank.com
snufflebug.com
tastemakr.com
scubapals.com

I’m such a Jetsetter. I’ve traveled 29,728 miles so far within the last year, which is more than 1.2 rotations around the earth’s equator. I’ve logged 18 trips to 4 countries, and I’m the 8th most well-traveled person amongst my jetsetting friends. On all of Facebook, I fall to being the 255th most well-traveled person, amongst all jetsetters.

How do I know this? Because I downloaded the Jetsetter application for Facebook, built by….VibeAgent!

In the first month alone, we’ve had over 2,000 downloads and 10,000 trips created on Jetsetter. It’s one of the most popular travel applications on Facebook, and growing every day. Jetsetter lets you log your trips and share them with your friends, and then compete to see how many miles you’ve traveled. If you haven’t checked it out already, please do. That would be swell.

(VibeAgent is a hotel search engine that provides you access to the largest selection of hotels and best travel deals.)

IPhone doesn’t need a pronoun or a particle. IPhone isn’t a regular, run of the mill thing, so it doesn’t associate with regular, run of the mill figures of speech. That would be a total drag. IPhone is an essence, a religion, a way of life…nerd nirvana. And yes, I admit it - I’m a nerd.

Ok, I’ve had iPhone for three days now. When I finished convincing myself that it was important to participate in such a world-changing event (this took me all of about 30 seconds), I threw myself into the frenzy full force - visiting 5 different stores in three different New York counties, only to be rebuffed each time…see, if I was going to get iPhone, I wanted the 8GB version, and each store was sold out. This, of course, only made me want iPhone more. Well, this Thursday, my wishes were finally fulfilled, and I secured 8GB iPhone. My life hasn’t been the same since.

As my friend Jack said succinctly, “this is perhaps the first device i’ve bought that’s actually exceeded my expectations.” Well said. If you haven’t already done so, go for it - go get yourself iPhone. It’s even better than you think it is. Apple is forecasting selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. I think they’ll beat it.

IPhone will change the world. Lots of applications will be developed for this platform. What’s neat is, no API necessary! Just create a simple web app that’s optimized for the Safari browser, and viola! - you’re in business. iPhone-optimized apps will also be tapping into a great demographic, one with disposable income to spend on things like a $600 phone.

The fact that I and most of our team work on Macs and have optimized VibeAgent first and foremost for the Safari browser, despite its small overall market share, has finally paid a dividend - VibeAgent looks great on iPhone, and works like a charm.

I won’t bore you with my particular take on all of iPhone’s features - I think you can get the best sense of that from here and here. The one down side to iPhone, and I think everyone agrees, is not actually related to iPhone at all - it’s the connectivity speeds on AT&T’s EDGE network. Quite disappointing. But of course, when you’re in a wi-fi spot, the phone seamlessly joins an available network, and speeds increase dramatically. Don’t let this stop you however from enjoying all the other fantastic aspects of iPhone’s experience. Trust me - you’ll be glad you did.

Twitter is like crack for people with ADD.
Which, it turns out, includes like OMG everybody younger than me, several big name bloggers and at least one presidential candidate.

Twitter is like junk food for small, self-absorbed brains.
Because it’s all about telling a group of people what you’re doing right now, all the time…not conversing, mind you; more like shouting at a party to no one in particular about whatever random nonsense that’s popped into your head at that moment.

Twitter is…the perfect storm.
For those of you Luddites that haven’t yet heard of the twitter phenomenon, and it does seem to be evolving into a phenomenon, let me give you a quick update.

Twitter is a new web service founded by Evan Williams and Biz Stone. The two previously collaborated at Pyra Labs, the company behind the blogging platform Blogger, that was acquired by Google in February 2003 (pre-IPO) for an undisclosed sum.

Interestingly, last October Evan was somehow able to buy out venture capitalists Charles River and all the other initial investors into Odeo, which at the time was the company that built and owned the applications odeo and twitter. The new company he formed to do this buy-out, Obvious Corp, in which Biz Stone and other former Odeo employees are also shareholders, then sold the odeo application to Sonic Mountain for about a million bucks last week, allowing them to focus their full resources on the burgeoning twitter phenomenon.

How does twitter work? Well, you add your friends on the site, and then start posting what you’re doing via the web, your IM client, or text message from your cell phone. That message then gets distributed to all your friends and followers through their chosen channel. That’s it. That’s twitter.

So like, you can totally be in touch with all your peeps 24/7, sharing such intimate moments as, “OMG brushing my teeth!” “LOL driving to work!” and “ROFL taking out trash!” Honestly, what could be better than that!

But remember, you’re not only sharing these intimate moments with others…they’re sharing them with you! So you also get notified when anyone in your network is “OMG brushing my teeth!” “LOL driving to work!” and “ROFL taking out trash!” Brilliant.

You can probably tell by now that I don’t get it. But it’s not just me, it’s everyone I know. We don’t get it. We don’t want it. But what really makes this painful for me is….it makes me feel old.

This twitter thing has become a dividing line; generational, to a great extent, but more so, attitudinal and behavioral. How do we view technology? What is our need for connectedness? What is our desire for privacy? How do we seek out human contact? What is the length of our attention span?

For me, the growing twitterati symbolizes the dramatic shift taking place in the way people interact with and consume information in all its forms. The question becomes, what are the long-term implications of our collectively decreasing attention spans and collectively increasing propensity to multi-task?

Danny Hillis is the prescient founder of the Long Now Foundation, an organization established in 1996 to encourage people to think long-term.

The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

One of the foundation’s projects is to build a clock, that “ticks once a year, bongs once a century, with a cuckoo that comes out every millennium.” I’m pretty sure Danny Hillis isn’t on twitter.

New fMRI studies at Toronto’s Rotman Research Institute suggest that as we get older, we have more trouble tuning out background thoughts when turning to a new task. Great. So I am getting old.

Perhaps, deep down somewhere, I secretly wish I could get excited about this twitter thing, and start shooting off messages left and right about each revelation that passes across my synapses. But then again, maybe I’ll just go read a book. For better or worse, this bird don’t tweet.

It’s been described as Web 3.0, an evolution of the World Wide Web that will enable machines to infer meaning from the content that exists online. Some have even called it the beginning of ubiquitous artificial intelligence (I bet Bill Joy is stocking his pantry right now).

Not a lot of people understand the semantic web. I mean, the king of blogging himself, Robert Scoble, just figured it out last week. I feel pretty good about that. He’s only got a week’s head start on me.

Given the obvious importance of understanding how to prevent the world from being overrun by robots, I decided to educate myself about SW (yeah, i’m down with the acronyms). What I’ve learned is that Tim Berners-Lee is one smart dude (yeah, this SW thing was his master plan). And also this: while the web is really good at helping people interact with computers and with other people, it’s not very good at helping computers interact intelligently with each other…yet. Primarily, because no instrinsic meaning is conveyed about the data being transported over the series of tubes.

As we all know, HTML is the computer language that helps position content on a web page. Let’s say I type “Boar’s Head Inn Charlottesville” into Google. My search results will be based on Google’s servers going out to find instances where that text, or some variation thereof, appears on a web page. It will then rank those pages based on how many other pages on the web link to them, and weight these links according to the popularity of the sites from which they originate (PageRank).

What Google’s servers don’t do is understand whether or not the text they’ve unearthed on the web pages they have searched definitively relate to the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville. They use the hotel’s name and links between pages as a proxy to determine relevance.

Well, what if we could skip that entire step? If the actual Boar’s Head Inn was assigned a unique identifier, any time data related to it was stored in a database, it could automatically be grouped with any other data on the web that related to the Boar’s Head Inn. Machines would take care of determining absolute relevance because they would be able to communicate directly with each other about the meaning of the data they were comparing, not simply the content.

Machine #1: I’ve got data on the Boar’s Head Inn. See? It’s F5rD40FY586. My data relates to room rates and availability.

Machine #2: Oh yeah. F5rD40FY586, I’ve got that too. My data relates to user recommendations. Let’s put ‘em together.

Machine #1: Well that was easy. Wanna go grab a coffee?

As a computer language, HTML is great at helping organize the name, address, photo and description of the Boar’s Head Inn on a web page. But where it falls short is providing computers with any meaning related to that content. That is where RDF, or Resource Description Framework, comes in. Developed in 1999, RDF provides universal standards for the structure of information online. RDF facilitates the semantic web by enabling the evolution of the storage of information from a natural language format to a universal structured format that is easy for both people and computers to understand.

So now, back to our Boar’s Head Inn Charlottesville search. With SW, I don’t have to spend my time figuring out which search results are relevant to me. The computers do that for me. I can instead spend my time on more efficient tasks. Such as what, you ask?

John Markoff at The New York Times has done some solid reporting on the subject (behind a registration wall), and offers some insight into what you might be able to do with the semantic web:

Whereas today’s travel recommendation sites force people to weed through long lists of comments and observations left by others, the Web. 3.0 system would weigh and rank all of the comments and find, by cognitive deduction, just the right hotel for a particular user.

Of course, you don’t have to wait for the semantic web to be able to access that functionality. You simply have to sign up to be a beta tester for VibeAgent.