GoingSocialTV debuts

by Chris Owen on

Travel video is really popular. Following the adventures of travel people all over the world or researching where you might go next, video is cool. Social media is really popular too. Facebook and Twitter have made that world a bit smaller and easier to navigate. A new TV show, GoingSocialTV, brings travel and social media together like never before.

“I created this show to highlight how social media is bringing the world together and how important it is now and how it will become even bigger for businesses” says GoingSocialTV creator JD Andrews.

Andrews comes loaded with what it takes to pull this off. Better known to Twitter fans as @earthXplorer, JD Andrews is an award-winning videographer, editor and producer who has traveled to 75 countries on six continents. Gadling met JD last year on a Twitter #FollowMeAtSea Alaska cruisetour sponsored by Princess Cruises. I was along on that trip and have to tell you: this guy is really passionate about travel.

“I traveled to London and Iceland, asking people in the travel industry (and Social media world) how and why they are using social media.” Andrews told Gadling.

@GoingSocialTV ~ Promo from JD Andrews on Vimeo.

Available on DirectTV channel 354 or live on the web at RRTV.com ,the first 30-minute episode debuted this week. In London, JD interviewed Founder and CEO of Tweetdeck Iain Dodsworth, Editor of Lonely Planet Tom Hall, Producer of Long Way Round & Long Way Down Russ Malkin and Founder of The Tuttle Club Lloyd Davis.

Also featured on the premiere show is a trip to Iceland and a Gears, Gadgets and Gizmos segment to be a regular feature on the program.

“My ideas for future episodes is actually showing how social media is beneficial while traveling, through apps, gadgets and even a simple tweet “I’m in London, where should I go?” said Andrews adding “I had so much help from the Social media community while traveling and that’s what it’s all about!”

In then next show GoingSocialTV travels to San Francisco and New York City to talk to Brian Simpson of The Roger Smith Hotel, Duncan Mitchell of Some E Cards, Craig Newmark founder of Craigslist, Jill Fletcher of Virgin America and Stephanie Michaels aka Adventure Girl.

As travel and social media become more intertwined, GoingSocialTV is one to watch, follow, bookmark and keep track of. Good things will be coming from this new combination of travel and social media which just totally makes sense.

Another great source of video is right here at Gadling where our writers span the globe to bring home the Gadling Travel Talk series like this one our Elizabeth Seward found in her Video of the Day series.

San Francisco from Dave Pinke on Vimeo.

Underwater suburbia planned in “Aquatica”

by Jon Bowermaster on

Dreamers have been imagining human life undersea for centuries. The most successful in turning that dream into reality have come up with musty, mobile-home-like contraptions tethered to barges or hooked by massive hoses to land where committed marine biologists toil for a week or two.

Aquanaut and bioengineer Dennis Chamberland hopes to expand upon those successes by building the equivalent of suburbs on the sea floor, a region where there is admittedly unlimited space for expansion.

With thirty years at NASA under his helmet, Chamberland’s big-picture vision is dubbed “Aquatica” and he imagines it as the first underwater settlement for “permanent human colonization.”

He’s got the credentials (Mission Commander of seven NASA underwater missions) and is credited with successfully using the ocean as a testing ground for life in space. His Advanced Space Life Support Systems, built for NASA, created safe-living underwater environments for anyone living “off-planet.”

But they were small picture settlements, home to just two to four people.His goal for the past couple decades – while writing science books and sci-fi novels in his spare time – has been to figure out how communities can successfully live underwater for long extended time.

To prove the viability of his beliefs he’s already overseen the growing of crops in controlled settings on the ocean floor and built a two man undersea “habitat” set on the ocean floor off Key Largo, Florida, which has been visited by, among other, James Cameron.

His big hopes are to see the first children born undersea and thus imagines “Aquatica” being home to schools and hospitals as well as a place for ocean research.

He also imagines that if people are living undersea they’ll be better protectors of it, essentially creating “a human colony whose primary purpose is to monitor and protect this most essential of the earth’s biomass.”

There’s got to be a first step to suburban living undersea, of course, which is expected to be launched sometime next year with the lowering to the seabed an underwater house he’s dubbed “Leviathan” … which will initially be home to four people.

Read more from Jon Bowermaster’s Adventures here.

[Flickr image via sindhi]

Robots in Antarctica? Closer than you think!

by Jon Bowermaster on

Who could have guessed that Antarctica – the world’s driest desert, where typically it barely snows during the summer months and the sun pounds down with nearly 24/7 predictability from November through February – that this season solar power would be proving a bust.

A Korean snowmobile expedition, hoping to reach the South Pole by machine using batteries charged by the sun, has been stymied by the same weather system that is producing those massive floods in Australia. The resulting heavy cloud cover and the most snow Antarctica has seen in two decades has stalled its efforts.

Options for the Koreans are to abandon and walk to the South Pole, or fill engines with gasoline (more likely), in order to get off the continent before winter sets in.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the crossing of Antarctica by pickup truck as well as the first vehicle to cross Antarctica by bio-fuel, which was judged a success … I guess … though it was followed by massive, six-wheeled, gas-guzzling trucks carrying gear and spare drivers.

Since Australian Douglas Mawson brought the first airplane to Antarctica, and Robert Falcon Scott brought trucks – all of which failed — maybe it’s time to admit that machines don’t belong on the 7th continent at all.
Which even as I type the words I realize is naïve, as each austral season man’s scientific and touristic footprints grow across Antarctica.

How about robots? It’s not far-fetched. The U.S. government is currently building a robot-driven caravan, which it hopes will help ferry fuel and supplies from the coastline base at McMurdo to its base at the South Pole.

The goal? To save human effort and risk and reduce man’s footprint.

The 1,500 mile long supply trip has been done the past two years – thanks to a road bladed by Americans — by a team of ten driving five giant tractors fitted with snowblades and dragging giant bladders of fuel behind. It takes 40 days to reach the South Pole and two weeks to return, obviously burning lots of gasoline in both directions.

The goal is to reduce the numbers of men to two and have the caravan run 24 hours a day, rather than the current 12-hour shift. Operations manager for the U.S. Antarctic Program George Blaisdell says the experimental robotic system, being developed by the NSF with researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, should be ready to test later this year.

One current driver, Kristy Carney – who’s done the commute three times – questions how the remotely operated trucks will do in snowstorms and deal with crevasses.

“You get stuck all the time,” she says. “If one gets totally buried (by snowstorms), it will affect the whole line. I don’t know how that would work without enough people to dig it out.”

Maybe it’s time to leave the machines at home and re-introduce dogs to Antarctica; they have been banned since 1991, allegedly for fear of introducing disease to the seal population.

Read more from Jon Bowermaster’s Adventures here.

[Flickr image via rayandbee]

4 reasons why you need a Travel Expert in your pocket

by Chris Owen on

This is the person you want to have on your side when planning travel. Not a Travel Agent, many of them are order takers who fill in the blanks on computer screens. Others try to be everything to everyone and that is just not possible.

Your Travel Expert specializes in one particular area of travel. It might be cruise vacations. They will know what cruise line will work best for you, keep on top of commodity-like cruise pricing and add a great deal of value to your vacation experience. It might be trips to Russia your Travel Expert specialized in. That person will know all there is to know, have been there a bunch of times (if not lived there) and probably speak a good amount of Russian. That’s the person I want helping me plan my vacation. Here are five reasons you need one of those people.

They know what to do in an emergency. You can bet that travelers on the ground in Egypt who have a Travel Expert on their side that knows the lay of the land are glad they do. Any travel agent with the right credentials can book a trip to Egypt. Someone who has visited there a lot or lived there will know specifically what you should do. You will be one of the people that made it out of the country while others lagged behind.

They will be honest with you. Any Travel Expert will tell you without hesitation if what you are looking for is not realistic. The last thing you want is a journey planned by a “yes” man who will say anything to get a sale. If you ever feel you are getting anywhere close to that situation you are not dealing with a Travel Expert. Look for your Travel Expert to speak at functions, teach classes, be involved with travel organizations and be easy to find publicly, like via Facebook, Twitter or a simple Google search.

They will insure a rich experience for you. That same knowledge that can give you an advantage if you had to evacuate a travel destination much more commonly works to enrich your travels. A Travel Expert knows people on the ground where you are going. Regardless of how you get there and what you want or need to see, its the people that will make the difference. A Travel Expert’s recommendation will get you in the door of places you might not ever see without his or her thumbs up.

They will encourage education. Everybody wants to talk about the fabulous places you will visit and things you will see. A Travel Expert will want to give you the knowledge over time that will allow you to appreciate what you will see and experience when you travel. In the olden days they would have given you a travel guide to read, maybe one printed by AAA, a leader in those sort of things. Today they will point you to sources like specific blogs, travel guide sites, and maybe send you a copy of the book they wrote.

You may end up paying one of these people for their expert advice. Be sure that advice comes gift-wrapped with that is called an Errors and Omissions insurance policy backing. That is insurance against loss if something goes horribly wrong directly due to advice you may have received from pretty much anyone in the travel business. Travel agents have it, so do Travel Experts who make a living selling their advice.

Photo: Wiki Commons

Whale Wars continue — despite Wikileaks

by Jon Bowermaster on

That the Sea Shepherd’s and Japanese whalers are skirmishing again — a recent tête-à-tête included the sling shotting of stink bombs (by the Shepherds) and false attempts to ram (by the Japanese) — the bigger news was the Wikileaks release of conversations between representatives of the U.S. government and their Japanese counterparts about how to shutdown the increasingly popular conservation group.

On the eve of a meeting of the International Whaling Commission in November 2009, a U.S. representative, Monica Medina, apparently broached the idea with senior officials from Japan’s Fisheries Agency of the possibility of revoking Sea Shepherd’s tax-exempt status.

On what basis? According to the leaked cable, first published on Wikileaks website and then in the Spanish daily El Pais, it was because the group “does not deserve tax exempt status based on their aggressive and harmful actions.”

In the past the Japanese have suggested if the Shepherd’s would stop chasing them, they might actually slow down their annual whale hunts. The group’s charismatic leader Paul Watson, for one, doesn’t trust them. “This is not about politics, it’s about economics,” he has said. “They will stop until they realize it is bad business, not because some government tells them to.”

In the cables both governments labeled the conservation group’s annual anti-whaling campaign an “irritant” in international relations.

Contacted by the AP aboard his ship Steve Irwin in the Southern Ocean, you could almost hear the glee in Watson’s reaction to the leaked cables, saying the secret talks proved Sea Shepherd was having an effect.

“We have had our tax status since 1981, and we have done nothing different since then to cause the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) to change that,” he said by telephone.

Meanwhile the daily cold war continues off the coast of Antarctica. For the past week the Sea Shepherd ships have been pursuing the Japanese factory ship the Nisshin Maru ever since finding the whaling fleet on December 31st. The pursuit has now covered a thousand miles.

If things continue like this – lots of harassment and engagement, few whales taken, no loss of life or ships and lots of media coverage — the Shepherd’s and Watson will be satisfied. As will the “Whale Wars” camera crews onboard documenting a fourth season.

This season’s campaign motto? “Operation No Compromise.” Watson’s goal is to cause enough distractions to force the whalers to give up and go home. For good.

Read more from Jon Bowermaster’s Adventures here.

[Flickr image via gsz]