TRAVEL
Western Australia Vimeo video. Woooooooooow! So beautiful!
41 Photos from the Mekong Markets at Dawn (Vietnam). By Legal Nomads. Love daily life pictures. Getting tired of first class seats & suites & lounges:-) My favorite pic (the only one of nature, oh the irony) is this:
Friendly life of Old Dhaka, Bangladesh. By Migrationology. Great pictures of regular people!
Perhaps this belongs in Oddz & Endz. This artist performs in a unique area of the art market: In flight entertainment! Her name is Nina Katchadurian and she “has been creating unusual works of art from her airplane seat — and occasionally the lavatory — since 2010…” . Very creative stuff in her body of work called “Seat Assignment“. Yes, all done sitting on her airplane seat!
Saverocity posted “The Beginners Guide to Booking a Cruise“. I finally got to it, very helpful! How to pay? He recommends Cruisecompete.com and Chase Sapphire card. I paid for our Carnival cruise last year with Capital One Venture points (from the mega 100k card deals!). Not sold on cruises, maybe when I slow down.
MILES/POINTS
As Delta Grows Stronger, Partner Benefits Suffer. By Cranky Flier. If you are going to read one piece on the latest Delta massacre, this is it!
The Goggle Wallet way of accumulating miles is already dead unless you want to pay a 2.9% fee using a credit card (of course you should NOT do it) . Well, boooo! We knew it was going to be difficult. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I managed to send a few payments! You can still send (for free) up to $250. Why can’t these Google guys be like Amazon, they sure got the money! I can’t wait for the “Boycott Google Wallet” cries. Or maybe someone will sue, sigh.
I did not get the 5x Thank You Citibank card but the recent actions by Citibank to close accounts and confiscate points have really, really managed to piss off many people. Proof? Look at post # 1243 by Marathon Man. Quote:
If we let Citi walk all over us on this thing, we help them set precedent that this can be the norm. It is our DUTY to stop them from doing that or it is our fault that we did not.
Oh the injustice! I am sure the class action lawsuit has been talked about too. Sigh!
ON MY MIND
Got the first watermelon of the summer and it was awesome! Spam crap in my blog is out of control, I deleted 26 spam comments this morning. I need to take a good look at that akismet plugin. Go San Antonio Spurs, what a game! That last shot by Tony Parker with 5 seconds left will be talked about for…ever!
I wonder how non full time bloggers find time to work on their blog. If I knew what it takes to maintain a blog I would have never started. I am trying hard to not let this thing take over my life:-) Then again, I spend lots of time trying to find worthy stuff to share with you here while others obsess about how to stick more affiliate links in front of your eyes. As an observer of this space only a few are adding value and even fewer are innovating. Most innovation is coming up with excuses how to stick yet another Chase Ink Bold link in front of your eyes.
BLOG BUZZ
It is amazing to me to see some bloggers, not well known for being timely on anything, are practically stepping on each other to push the Citibank Aadvantage Platinum Select Mastercard affiliate links. These were the same bloggers who were pushing the far superior non affiliate Citi AA links for years…NOT!!! Yeah, snark baby!
Ariana of Pointchaser (who also writes at Frugal Travel Guy) confirmed in the comments she did not delete the link posted by View from the Wing in her post about Rocketmiles. Thanks, I had no doubt about this. Readers can make up their own minds about such practices!
There are just so many blogs out there today…so much repetition. I am getting bored.
I reduced the size of the photos. I have no idea how much space I have and the last thing I need is a notice from Big Daddy host asking me for money! Reducing the pic size sure does not look that good…Another blogging dilemma!
ODDZ & ENDZ
The Reclusive Peeping Tom Photographer and his cardboard Camera. The incredible story of eccentric Miroslav Tichy, an amateur photographer from the Czech Republic who just could not stop taking pictures with his hand made cameras. Passed away in 2011 after being discovered in 2004. A fascinating story and personality!
Justin Bieber Going To Space On Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. Hope they got him a one way ticket!
Be kind…Don’t be angry:-)
Always look at the bright side of life
While (true) {
DO
MileValue bad ;
TPG stinks ;
FTG censors! ;
Jamie Dimon bitch me please ;
MMS Shat. It smelled so good!! DD/Emily email me 🙂 ;
I am a blogger ;
North Korea ;
DONE
}
You’re a BLOGGER? Boy I would love to see you work, must be trash, like your comments.
No need for that, you tell ’em Mahatma dude!
I love to bitch Jamie instead
Lol
Mongo just did his APP-ORGY and used the affiliate links on MMS. Why, because Mongo feels that the bashing MMS took lately was way over the top and unnecessary. This is Mongo’s way to show support for MMS. His search engine onsite is a great place to get the answer for my specific questions (Mongo thinks Flyertalk blows for this) , and he does tell you the best offer out there. Mongo agrees MMS’s demographic market is for Newbies, one of which Mongo will always consider myself to be one, even though Mongo has been collecting credit cards for points/miles since John Travolta was straight………… Mongo like candy (and ribs).
http://youtu.be/SKRma7PDW10
Mongo, you do what you want, we are in a free country:-)
I do think FT blows in the search function too!
He does tell you the best offer. True.
Mongo, there is a day when you are no longer a newbie and it looks like you crossed it years ago? It’s okay, I never forget we were all newbies once:-)
I like watermelons
You declare Ariana didn’t delete the better offer from the FTG site. Great. But then the obvious question is WHO DID? “Follow the money.”
And Marathon Man is up in arms over Citibank because after them.. what bank is still willing to have a relationship with him?
TBB has no funds to launch investigative reports like 60 Minutes. So we are left to reach our own conclusions:-)
Love MM, he provides great entertainment, especially when he is “unjustly” screwed after screwing with them banks:-)
Oliver2002 posted on Flyertalk a link to compete.com with stats for Milepoint.
What’s interesting is looking at compete.com for other sites. Flyertalk appears to have lost about half its visitors in the past year (~ 400k down to just under 200k and 6-7x the size of Milepoint).
BoardingArea shows 100k unique visitors in the past month. Word is that Gary has the most BoardingArea traffic by a decent margin, we can assume that’s about the size of his reach (not that many people going to boardingarea who are NOT reading him — someone that reads him AND DeltaPoints counts as just one unique visitor for Boarding Area). Most of those people probably also read lucky.
A quick reading up on compete.com lots of reports that they tend to underestimate traffic, but it’s pretty uniform, usually about 20% – 30%. So maybe all of the stats are higher than they appear there, but this should give us at least a relative sense of traffic.
TPG 49k visitors
MMS 36k
DansDeals 29k
FTG “This site has relatively low traffic.”
I would LOVE to see how each blogger ranks WITHIN Boarding Area. No doubt Gary is leading the pack by far. I would not want to be on that list and rank consistently last you know! I am sure these results are shared within the BA bloggers? I don’t know.
I knew TPG is way up front individually. I did not know MMS was that close to him. I think DD was right where I expected.
That compete.com site is a pay site right Oliver? Can you compare my site and FTG? I need extra motivation to challenge myself:-)
Siteanalytics/compete gives away the data (for the US stats) for free and in a easy to link format. For more detailed data (but requires a free account signup) GDN Adplanner is a better way to get to some better stats: https://www.google.com/adplanner/#siteDetails?uid=boardingarea.com&geo=001
GDN shows FT has 1M UV from the US, 2M worldwide, with pageviews in the range of 1M for the US and 2-5M worldwide. BA is more like a 10th of that.
Little blogs are too small to get serious estimates of traffic. You have enable your site with google analytics to get detailed stats about the visitors of your site yourself and for it to be published to analysis sites.
TPG says on his site that he has 400,000 unique monthly visitors (see the bio page, you need to click to open up the full version).
Those stats above are nonsense. My little UK blog gets 40,000 unique visitors per month.
And this is what I am talking about. There are so many metrics out there!! It is similar to diet findings. You get so many different findings coming out all the time. And for a person like me who obviously am a novice in this online blogging stuff this is beyond confusing!
When this site was hosted at Blogger first screen used to tell me the number of page views. It crossed 200,000 since inception. Then when I pull up Google Analytics that number is a fraction of the 200k. So many different terms and they sound so similar. Some say unique visitors is all what matters, others say it is conversions (WTF is that?)…
If I had time I would learn more…Now I need to crank out some stupid Continuing Education credits to keep my CPA license. Every 2 years I need to learn about auditing crap. I have not had to do an audit in over 20 years…Waste of time and money at its finest!
Oliver:Thanks a lot for the info.
Raffles: You prove my point that the metrics in this stuff can be so wildly diferent. I don’t know what to look for so I stopped looking! I ain’t got time fordat lol.
It really depends what is important for you:
– do many visit my site? = UV
– do they read stuff? = page impressions and minutes spent
– do they click on links within the site? = page impressions
– do they click on ads/affiliate links? = conversions
The siteanalytics is just US regional data, but its consistent enough to analyse trends: when MP gives away ipad(s) during the freddies, UVs spike on all metrics. The same happens to FT when it gets a mention in the press or on the today show.
This is great stuff, I made some notes, thanks. I guess I do not have to worry about the “Conversions” number:-)
As a novice blogger….I guess I do not know what is important to me. What SHOULD be important to me? I guess at what point do I know my blog has become a player online?
So…how do you define “Player”? Ratio of postive/negative comments should be a metric as far as I am concerned! And I need to do more for negative comments #beafraidbloggerbevery afraid
Dang AnnArbor weather, not good enough for grilling again
Spurssssss!!! That shot by TP was indeed amazing. So glad to see them steal back home court advantage. Just booked my flights (using WN CP and points) down to Austin (hitting the BBQ trail down to SAT, AMAZING!!!) and back from SAT for Game 5. As a big Spurs fan, I’d love to see them sweep the Heat, but if not, Game 5 is going to be awesome. Now to find tickets….
Posted a link with Parker’s shot in slow motion, legendary stuff indeed! It is just Game 1.I think the series will go at least 6 or 7. Then again all season long these Spurs have made me look like an idiot. I was in San Antonio years ago when they played in the Finals with the Detroit Pistons. Me and son had our Pistons shirts on. #wewillbeback
I don’t see the Heat losing 3 in a row in SA. But I can tell you they all now realize this is not the Pacers!
Mongo just came back from Supermarket where he saw a picture of TheMrPickles on the side of a milk container.
Disappeared as a child, still on the loose?
🙂