{"id":3782,"date":"2010-10-09T17:43:41","date_gmt":"2010-10-10T00:43:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=3782"},"modified":"2010-10-09T18:01:53","modified_gmt":"2010-10-10T01:01:53","slug":"letter-from-the-editor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/09\/letter-from-the-editor\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter from the Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not cold out &#8212; yet &#8212;\u00a0 but there&#8217;s an awful lot of rain falling from the sky. The seasons are shifting in Seattle, and when this happens, it&#8217;s a good time to turn to money earning pursuits, the making of soup, and other activities that take advantage of indoor time. As I&#8217;ve migrated to writing more travel essays, it&#8217;s become increasingly rare that I peel back the curtain and let you take a peek at the machinery, but there&#8217;s lots happening that I&#8217;d like to tell you about, and some of it you might find you want to participate in.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The crew behind <a href=\"http:\/\/www.passportswithpurpose.com\/\">Passports with Purpose<\/a>, the travelbloggers fundraiser, has been hard at work. We&#8217;re super excited by this year&#8217;s sponsors. At the top of the lists, there&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bootnsall.com\">BootsnAll<\/a>, our Portland based friends who totally get the whole &#8220;travel plus community equals awesome&#8221; equation. We&#8217;re grateful to Sean Keener for coming to speak at the last Seattle Consortium of Online Travel gathering, and more grateful for his support for this year&#8217;s initiative. Wondering what that is? Well, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.friendsoflafti.org\/\">we&#8217;re building a village<\/a>. No, really, you should check out the Passports site for details. In addition to the BootsnAll crew, we&#8217;re supported by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.livemocha.com\/\">Live Mocha,<\/a> an online language learning community, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.homeaway.com\/\">HomeAway<\/a>, my favorite &#8220;book your vacation rental&#8221; service, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.travellerspoint.com\/\">Traveller&#8217;s Point<\/a>, a great place to share your experiences online. Oh, yeah, and as of today, over 80 bloggers have signed up to participate in our efforts. So we&#8217;re supported by you, too, and thank you for that.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.avidtrips.com\/blog\">AvidBlog<\/a> launched with some beautiful stories and photographs by a handful of great contributors. I&#8217;m proud of sourcing the work that went up in those first few updates, but the current editorial model &#8220;isn&#8217;t sustainable&#8221;. You&#8217;ve heard that message before and it&#8217;s the struggle with so many travel story sites. There&#8217;s some restructuring happening, but I remain optimistic.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t know when the next update will be published, but I hope you&#8217;ll take a peek at what&#8217;s there now, the gorgeous photographs, the evocative posts, and oh, yeah, the hot Venezuelans. Whew.<\/li>\n<li>I have a new venture with two great co-conspirators! Together with Peter Carey and Debbie Dubrow, we&#8217;ve created <a href=\"http:\/\/www.travelblogschool.com\/\">Travelblog School<\/a>, a weekend of focused, hands on workshops that are designed to shine up your blog, big time, with better writing, photography, and marketing. We&#8217;ll work on the craft behind making a blog that people love to read, on getting out of the classic &#8220;journal of my trip&#8221; trap that so many bloggers get stuck in, on taking great pictures, and on finding your audience. We&#8217;re excited to be hosted by the very blogger friendly <a href=\"http:\/\/www.themaxwellhotel.com\/\">Maxwell Hotel<\/a> in Queen Anne. We won&#8217;t be holed up in a conference room all weekend &#8212; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seattlefoodtours.com\/index.php\">Seattle Food Tours<\/a> will be our hosts for a guided tour of Pike Place Market, giving us great fodder for blogging. Come spend a weekend with us in Seattle, go home a better blogger. And hey, if someone has been pestering you to teach them how to blog, you&#8217;d be doing us a favor by sending them our way.<\/li>\n<li>On the travel\/writing side, I had a story published in the October issue of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.perceptivetravel.com\/issues\/1010\/music.html\">Perceptive Travel<\/a>, and National Geographic Intelligent Traveler ran this <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.nationalgeographic.com\/blogs\/intelligenttravel\/2010\/09\/alaska-in-the-fall.html\">photo essay from my recent trip to Alaska<\/a>. I&#8217;m still dizzy from the wonder of that trip and later this month, I&#8217;ll be a guest at the Alaska Travel Media Roadshow. I want very much to go back to Alaska in winter &#8212; while I know it would be bitter cold, I also think there must be nothing like it and I&#8217;m very curious about the experience. I recently received the best rejection letter <em>ever<\/em> from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.afar.com\/\">Afar<\/a> &#8212; &#8220;Nerd&#8217;s Eye View! We love your blog!&#8221; &#8212; and was not disheartened in the least by it; I promptly sent the same pitch elsewhere and I continue to wait, wait, wait for a response. I&#8217;m currently working on a trip to Maui that will give me much needed fodder for my Hawaii blog, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.holoholowale.com\">Holoholo Wale<\/a>. The trip will coincide with our anniversary &#8212; we were married south of Kihei at Poolenalena Beach Park ten (!!!) years ago. Finally, we are trying to plan a trip back to Austria to visit the in-laws next spring or summer. That&#8217;s a ways out, but still requires complex planning and budgeting.<\/li>\n<li>On the &#8220;day job&#8221; front, I&#8217;ve been quite busy &#8212; I contributed some copy for a beauty product (not my market, this was very hard), a nuclear research facility (turns out I like the science-y gigs), and am currently tied up not quite full time as the content strategist\/copy writer on a biotech site. I&#8217;m happy to have the work as my health insurance payments decided to get closer to 400 dollars a month than they were far away from 400 dollars a month, a topic that isn&#8217;t really necessary for me to elaborate on besides saying, &#8220;So, um, Congress, what&#8217;s up?&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/westseattletechsupport.com\/\">West Seattle Tech Support Guy<\/a> continues to get good word of mouth business, and on this front, your word of mouth would be appreciated.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If things seem a little slow here online at Nerd&#8217;s Eye View lately, all this should explain why. In between making a living, trying to do good, launching new ventures, and pursuing some off the blog writing opportunities, there&#8217;s not a lot of time for much else. But we are well, thriving, even, and yes, of course I&#8217;m still playing the ukulele. And I think that&#8217;s as good a place to leave this as any &#8212; with something silly, featuring things I love: ukulele and claymation. Enjoy, be happy, and don&#8217;t tell a narwhal who to love.<\/p>\n<p><object classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" width=\"560\" height=\"340\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/4oAUio0vs90?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US\" \/><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" \/><embed type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" width=\"560\" height=\"340\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/4oAUio0vs90?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\"><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not cold out &#8212; yet &#8212;\u00a0 but there&#8217;s an awful lot of rain falling from the sky. The seasons are shifting in Seattle, and when this happens, it&#8217;s a good time to turn to money earning pursuits, the making of soup, and other activities that take advantage of indoor time. As I&#8217;ve migrated to &#8230; <\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more-container\"><a title=\"Letter from the Editor\" class=\"read-more button\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/09\/letter-from-the-editor\/#more-3782\" aria-label=\"Read more about Letter from the Editor\"><br \/>&#8230;read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-administrivia","masonry-post","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3782"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3786,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3782\/revisions\/3786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}