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| TBB Family at DTW on the way to HNL in 2010 |
Today marks the three month anniversary since I started blogging. This was my main goal when I started, mission accomplished!
It is also the last daily Buzz blog post for the foreseeable future! I simply can not continue this brutal pace, it is exhausting! I need to tend to my other life which took a very unexpected and unbelievable (positive) turn earlier this week! I simply need to totally focus on that and not have my time occupied by reviewing the numerous travel miles/points blogs to see which ones make the TBB cut!
I am not going away. This blog will be updated about once a week. It will look very different than the format you were accustomed to so far. My intent is to feature amazing blog posts you may have missed and as always give my veteran spin on them and developments in the community. I will also not have the pressure of finishing the Buzz post and may have some time to work on some posts I promised and never had the time to write. I may even look into improving the site design! If I am really bored I may even look to get some affiliate links and throw them up in a separate tab like Frequent Miler does:-) All I know is I will have more time to FOCUS writing for this new gig as the exposure is super huge!
I really enjoyed doing this! In my own way (a few may still call it angry, you be the judge) I tried hard to LIFT the quality level of other bloggers in this community! I never EVER advocated NOT monetizing a blog! I always advocated that bloggers should focus on providing quality and original content and work harder to earn your clicks! Not only that but they should treat you with respect which is NOT inserting affiliate links in every opportunity! Practices such as promoting inferior affiliate credit card links, eye socket attacks with numerous affiliate links in blog posts (I believe the record was 35), no visible disclosure of the present financial relationship, censoring of comments, not disclosing HT where appropriate, and pure bad advice should not be tolerated! Take your mouse and click elsewhere!
And PLEASE PLEASE be careful what you encourage newbies to do. You just can’t take a newbie who never had more than one credit or debit card in his/her life and get them to do a 5 card apporama with over $12k minimum spend ok? Yeah, you will show them how only IF they followed your script. A bunch of BS, you know, life gets in the way like it usually does and some dig their own holes! PLEASE let’s promote some caution instead. Most people are not cut out for this hobby and we all know it! And this is why I despise the current business model…it can be very dangerous and ruin lives and my blogger friends feel obligated to…encourage this practice! And this is the way it is…
Dan at DansDeals has always participated constructively in the comments of this blog. He wrote this comment below which I think it is right on:
“I’m not going to deny being beholden, it frustrates me as much as anyone else. But that’s life in a one income household with kids..
Blogging is NOT easy. You have to be ON almost 24/7. There are always spam comments to delete, emails to answer and of course comments. And of course it is so hard coming up with quality content day in and day out. Well, it was not a problem here at TBB but it was just not sustainable! Be demanding if their venture is for profit…and cut them a little slack here and there, you know, life gets in the way!
BEST OF MILES/POINTS
Bravo to The Points Guy for doing a separate blog post “Best Offer For US Airways Mastercard“.
Keep it up now that I am going away ok? 🙂
Ran into a new blog: The Miles Professor “A former Caltech math professor takes miles and points to the limit”. Some good stuff on Caribbean Travel too. Affiliate links at some point too;-)
Million Mile Secrets interviews Travel Summary. Good stuff.
Frequent Flyer University wrote “Alitalia-Pay for what you get-An airline that would make Berlusconi proud“. This is a warning not to jump on every “deal”! Reading about all the time spent on the phone hurts! It looks like that employee from the Cyprus deal is gone (was it Roberto, Alberto or something else?)
BEST OF TRAVEL
MichaelW Travels has this quirky page with ridiculous street signs
Cacinda blogs at PointsandTravel and wrote “My thoughts on Tourism vs Travel“. I absoluely loved the ending “So my advice to you is “don’t be a tourist, travel more, plan less.” Sometimes we should take the bus, don’t always fly once you get there. I urge you to take a look around and get off the beaten path, go see the world with wonder.” I so agree! And I will have more time to do this now, churn some cards too, yeah;-)
PointChaser continues the series with the Best Club Carlson redemptions: Category 3.
NOT SO BEST OF
To everyone who appeared here before…you deserved it:-) I am watching you, don’t make me come back to do extra posts just for ya, thanks:-)
To all my readers, thank you so much for reading my blog posts every day! I hope I made a difference in your life; if not, at least I hope you had some laughs reading TBB!
See you next week, not sure when. Weekend most likely!
Sincerely,
George
TravelBloggerBuzz
I will sincerely miss the daily updates and greedy affiliate link bashing (bravo) but look forward to the weekly recap.
Go n-éirí an bóthar leath!
May the road up to meet you and the wind be always at your back!
Paddy
emm…May the road RISE up..
Thank you very much, I appreciate the kind words.
Wow George! Thanks for my BEST OF quote! You and me love to travel and wander and see the world! It is an amazing place and one where we meet wonderful people along the way. We gonna miss your daily rants!
Thank you, I loved your quote!
Hey George, good luck with your new career venture; it sounds like it will be very challenging but you will love it! You have a great looking family!
Thank you! It is a new venture, not new career! It’s with a very famous Journal;-)
Great job George. Can’t believe it’s already been 3 months since you started blogging! I look forward to your once a week posts, and I’m sure many others will also.
Will you be at FTU? By that point I hope to have some business to discuss and doing so in-person would be great!
As of now, no FTU. But knowing me I probably can’t stay away…so I may need to pick up a ticket from someone who cancels. So…stay tuned.
The employee from the Cyprus deal was Nicolo Cimilluca.
Oh yes Nicolo, thanks!
Aaaww George….your daily posts will be very much missed! It was always the last post of the day before I hit the sack. I wish you the best in your unexpected and positive turn, and hope you still have the time to keep writing this blog!
Thank you! I think I can handle this baby once a week
George, best of luck, I’ll miss your daily posts too, but I agree that it’s near to impossible to produce quality content every single day if you have a life outside of blogging. That said, I’m getting increasingly tired of the hundreds of copycat posts I see in my google reader everyday. You should be able to build a successful niche with a weekly blog recap.
Thank you very much. Keeping at a high level day in day out is awfully hard for sure! But I did my best…Now let me see what I can as a weekly blogger…
I’ll miss the daily updates, but look forward to the next evolution of TBB. Keep up the great work, George!
Thank you very much. Yeah, I like the sound of that, next evolution of TBB.
I’ve been loving it. Any chance you’ll publish the list of “who you follow”?
I follow everybody for TBB:-) I think you mean who I personally recommend as far as blogs go? Good idea, maybe I can do my top 10 or something.
+1
Thanks for the mention! Glad to have made the last daily buzz post in your best of travel section! If you or any of your readers have any ridiculous or funny signs that you would like featured, you can e-mail me at michaelwtravels@gmail.com
Ok, I will keep that in mind. I like that page, very unique!
Thanks again! I have another tab that you might like of jumping photos all over the world.
Good luck to you-enjoyed your fresh and pretty spot on perspective on things. Looking forward to reading the weekly updates as well.
Is this a photo of the mysterious “Asian woman” rumored on FT to be buying up all of the VRs?? 😉
BothofUs2: Thank you!
Anonymous: Yep, well trained!
Bluebird
You know it!
“We’re going to miss you greatly”
– FTG, DP and MV
Mega LOL
This weeks Sunday Reader Question on TPG was “Can you please post the links to the SPG Amex, CSP, CIB and CIP? Pretty pretty please?”
I am missing this daily comment exchanges already:-)
Even if you don’t make a post in a given day, you should at least open up a generic “open thread” and let the comments take care of themselves 🙂
So first of all, sure, I like daily updates but long as you’re still blogging it’s not a big difference. I’ll have to check once a week instead… so no pressure. It will be fine doing what you can.
Also, not to be critical but I do have some constructive feed back. It seems that keeping bloggers accountable with “better links” has been awesome! I think you can see the effects. But isn’t it odd that now we’re praising bloggers (like TPG) for using the links they should be using anyways? Like that post doesn’t say ANYTHING that hasn’t been said many times a long time ago… but it made the best of? It had no contribution to our game but because he is so big, he gets mentioned. Meanwhile, other bloggers make actual contributions. I found 4 AA links that were better than the ones we had (visa, amex, biz MC and biz visa (none of which affiliate)) that are now being used on FT. Actually, I don’t want to make it sound personal cuz it reall isn’t… so in fact, it’s nothing compared to a daily post by Lucky. He has great contributions daily and I’m not so sure it’s equally “best of” as TPG’s not posting a crappier link. SO MY POINT IS, I’m not sure us readers want to hear about every time someone doesn’t push bad credit cards. I personally would rather hear about great contributions like lucky seems to crank out than how TPG posted about the USA card… Maybe it’s just me… but I agree on one thing. If they go pushing credit card links by the dozens on a post about wine, or pushing bad links. Grill them! it’s entertaining after all!
Agree 100%
In the past few days, FTG has made best of for NOT censoring comments, and TPG for pointing out there’s a better link than an affiliate one. Meanwhile dozens of bloggers actually put that into practice every day, but don’t get mentioned.
TBB has gone way too soft on TPG relative to how terrible he is – the guy literally got caught red handed plagiarizing a post (as opposed to the dozens of times where he clearly plagiarized but didn’t get caught red handed), and ended up in the “best of” the next day for having a post saying something blatantly obvious (is there any doubt that post was only put up because the Koh Samui one was busted?)
I featured that TPG post because it represented a huge improvement in past practices and wanted to highlight so we….can get more of them, you know, praise:-)
Grilling was great for daily blog posts. I just don’t see how it can be done in a weekly post. If I continued that…it may resemble a post like one of FT Marathon Man’s infamous long posts! So…we shall see, I need to find a good weekly blog theme and just hit it!
just set the bar higher for the grilling. As in more than just “puts in 3 Chase links”
Has to be really over the top terrible, like a 35 links bombardment, or giving really horrific advice
Dude, Grilling is your niche. It’s controversial (which is good for readership and activity (like comments)) and keeps people really curious. Plus, we have you to thanks for the few improvements in the blogger world. IMHO.
Thanks for the feeback
George
Master Griller:-)
Oh man, you couldn’t have stuck around one more day to comment on Mommmypoint’s latest post The “new double browser trick.” C’mon Man!
80 / 20 is also a good idea to remember as well. Keep the big boys in line and the rest will take care of themselves.
I would like TBB to focus on the bigger bloggers instead
Nobody really reads MilesMomma anyways, so who cares if she’s pushing inferior credit cards?
^^^^^
I meant focus on the bigger bloggers for transgressions. Obviously if a smaller blogger writes a superb post, it should get attention
Prolly true.
Thank you!
This is by far my favorite obsessive-compulsive travel-nerd blog. I’ll be sorry to see fewer posts but highly commend you for your work the past few months. Thanks for keeping people honest.
I really appreciate the kind words. I thought about pulling a Brett Favre move but then came to my senses. Then I thought I can find the ONE post per day that really blew me away…kind of like an MVP post and highlight that…hmm, I don’t know. I am just now settling in to a new routine with the other gig I have going
Thank you George for doing this blog. I believe it has accomplished something with a lot of bloggers (TPG now promoting non-affiliate USair card) and not so much (Delta Points). Anyway, best wishes and your thoughts will be missed!!
Thank you very much. That was my goal from the get go. I am not going away…
Please…. I disagree with almost everything George stands for! I will continue to proudly censer the “angry’s”, to not recommend cards that require you to lie to get them or change computer code, or to hurt my readers eyes by pasting non-needed disclaimers all over posts! Oh, and yes, I will look for more chances to link in comments and in posts!
Rene: I appreciate your comment here and will of course let it stay here. We agree to disagree. Nothing wrong with that. C’est la vie.
Best of luck to you.
“to not recommend cards that require you to lie”
Funny how that only works with CC’s that don’t get you affiliate $$$
You never seem to have such reservations when it comes to the T&C’s of oh, i don’t know…. Ink Bold for example?
I see MMS has an article “Why a US Air & American Airlines Merger Is Bad For Most….& Good For a Few”
I didn’t read the post. I have no idea whether I would agree with it or not
That being said, assuming the post talks about what the headlinne infers, he should automatically make “best of” on the sole basis of being the first person to have an AA/US post that isn’t just “my predictions for the new airline” (and then proceed to make the exact same predictions that 3 dozen other bloggers made)
I am so preoccupied with the mother in law mega trip report, part 32,168: Mother in law goes to the bathroom, “false alarm” she says
All in name of good fun:-)
As I’ve told you privately, you have improved the travel blogging world by keeping the bloggers accountable. I believe their writing/behavior changed because of what you wrote, albeit with some exceptions(milevalue USAir link!). And even a 1x/weekly may still continue to do so.
Unfortunately, it will be difficult for me to remember to hit up this blog when it’s not part of my daily blog read ritual. (and it has been the first one I view daily for 2 months)
Sadly, life gets in the way sometimes. Can’t fault you for that. Best of luck in your new endeavor.
I am doing a post right NOW. Brett Favre came back, why not TBB:-) I totally understand the daily routine thing. It is too much fun. Much shorter posts with only MVP type posts!
Awesome.
Txs George you too and hope you hit a home run in new endeavors!
@Anonymous – as expected, the “angry’s” show the same class as always – so sad!