I must congratulate Darren at Travel Rants for his excellent April Fool about selling out to Expedia!
Comments like this are absolute gems:
Being able to write on the subject from many different viewpoints that appeals to the average reader. Travel Blogs are a dime-a-dozen out there - yours is one of 2 that all of us in my office read every update of. The big companies need a guy like you to manage their blogs. We don’t want to read badly written travel reviews anymore and nor do we wanna be “sold” to when we read a blog. So I believed what I was reading about Expedia “buying” you out - its not totally out of the realms of possibility - maybe the price was a bit over the top, but not the actual possibility that it could happen.”
It is often said that many a truth is said in jest, but I’m not sure how many Tripadvisor users really appreciate (a) that the site is owned by the same group which owns Expedia, and (b) just how much clutter they have to sift through to get the answers they want.
Naturally, for honest hotel reviews, I’d always recommend taking a look over at Holiday Watchdog, but Darren clearly has a style which is going to make me want to come back and read his blog more often - if only I wasn’t trying to cut down on all this random internet surfing!
I hope that we can make Flightblogging a useful user experience, which should become much more integrated over the next few days, as we link it in to the main Flightmapping site, but I’ll always bear in mind the following closing quote from the same comment for inspiration:
Thanks again for writing and managing this blog… as you can see by this post’s comments, you have many fans!