After 7 days over Christmas back country motorcycle touring in Vietnam, 4 days on Koh Panang for the full moon party, and 3 days in Bangkok i’m back, i’ve actually been back a week but have been unable to construct the summary blog post. My vacation has left me speechless and a little humbled, the people that i’ve met and the circumstances of their lives had quite an impact on me. Vietnam especially left me in awe of people in the countryside who live extraordinarily difficult lives but were so incredibly hospitable and happy it just blew me and my friends away. Believe it or not once you get outside of the major cities westerners are few and far between, I think we saw 3 westerners in 6 days, so every village we stopped in we were an oddity, people would come out of their houses to look at us, and even some of the most pensive faces would crack a huge smile if you just waved your hand and said hello. Here are a few of my fav pics from Vietnam, feel free to check out the rest of the Vietnam pictures here and the Thailand pictures here. If you are interested in a trip like this you should check out Off Road Vietnam. Vietnam is growing at a tremendous rate at the moment and like China has discovered free market economics, it is suggested that if you want to see rural Vietnam as it is now you will need to do it in the next 10 years.
Oh, and we also really got to eat very well… here’s some video of me eating a fertilized duck egg for breakfast
(i’ll be uploading more videos to karllong.blip.tv and hopefully me and my buddies will put a proper edit together of our adventures as we have a tonne of footage)
Well I’m just getting ready to leave for the airport, I have a midnight flight to Taipei and then on to Vietnam for a motorcycle tour through the northwest mountains. I don’t think i’ll be blogging much but i’ll try and keep flickr and twitter updated via my N95 8gig Hopefully I can keep my batteries charged both literally and figuratively for the Full Moon party in Thailand which is the destination for new years eve. So here’s wishing you all an early Merry Christmas, happy holidays and an excellent New Year.
LOL, is it me or is this guy taking some swipes at scoble:
“blogging even if your wrong” when scoble was talking about search and then the closing classic picture of scoble leaving the apple store in triumph with the iPhone?
Is there a bubble, absolutely, but as with all bubbles there are some companies that are doing brilliant work and are creating tremendous value. The trick is to pick the companies that are creating real “value”, and IMHO I would avoid business models that rely on driving people to advertisers. Yes, yes, I know Google, but I actually think Google creates value by connecting people with what they need, advertising is secondary, a fine distinction but one worth thinking about and maybe elaborating on more.
I think this is quite a fun little video that someone at Nokia has created, and as they say web 2.0 is about connecting people as it always has been. Found this via TechCrunch and Arrington thinks it’s ‘aght.
Eyelesswriter.com called up Verizon 56 times to ask two questions about their data rates and recorded the conversations. Only 1 out of 56 reps got both questions right.
David Armano did a hell of a job at the Forrester Consumer forum, running round with a laptop streaming the whole conference to the Critical Mass media mashup at alwaysinbeta.criticalmass.com, including their twitter feed, chatroom, and ustream video feed.
One of the high points of the conference for me was hanging out and chatting with Ze Frank and David did an impromptu video with him via Ustream. Ze is apparently not thrilled with most of the interviews he does, and I can imagine he gets asked the same crap over and over again. Armano did a good job of just having a conversation with him and it’s interesting stuff. I find that Ze has an outsiders perspective and helps deflate mental models that business people have quickly built to navigate the tumultuous changes in the business environment. Some might call Ze’s approach common sense, but you know what they say about common sense, it’s not too common.
Well i’m sitting in the airport at SFO, had to get up at 4.30am, on my way to Chicago for the Forrester Consumer Forum. I was asked by Peter Kim to speak on a panel on brand monitoring in social media (well the whole conference seems to have a social media focus), so i’m really looking forward to that. I’m also looking forward to meeting David Armano for the first time, even though we’ve been blogging buddies for well over a year now. David was recently hired by Critical Mass a User Experience design consultancy and they are taking a very active role in this conference. They are covering it six ways to sunday on their “always beta” blog/microblog/videoblog thing here. It’ll also be great to catch up with Jeremiah Owyang, a web strategy blogger who was recently snatched up by Forrester, I was on a panel with Jeremiah last year at AdTech SF which was very fun and interesting.
File this under great wonders of the internet, a 13 gigapixel photograph of Harlem. In the top left of this photo is the entire panorama, and the tiny red square is the area i’m zoomed in on.
and a bit about the project:
BTW 13 Gigapixels means 13 Billion pixels, whereas regular cameras are measured in Megapixels which are a Million pixels each.
Hopefully I can keep my batteries charged both literally and figuratively for the Full Moon party in Thailand which is the destination for new years eve. So here’s wishing you all an early Merry Christmas, happy holidays and an excellent New Year. 
