Official Cosmotourist Blog

Travel tips of specific interest can now be found on the Cosmotourist homepage. Here you will find a ranking list entitled Top Travel Tips showing the 3 most popular travel tips per month. The tips that appear here have received the most positive feedback by members of the community.  By clicking on MORE you will be directed to a full page of travel tips that have been rated positively by users in the corresponding month.

This new feature was launched with a competition in February. Nina 5 was the proud winner, taking away 300$! Her travel tip TABLA INDIAN RESTAURANT gained much acclaim. Her travel tip was rated by 136 people in February, who have no doubt now been inspired to to visit the restaurant themselves!

Our congratulations go to Nina and to all Cosmotourists who participated in the competition. For those who didn’t win there is no need for disappointment as there will be plenty of other competitions coming up in the near future-so stay tuned!

I’ve just met with one of the guys of the startup LAMP1701 here at the web 2.0 expo in berlin and they really have some exciting stuff going on, at least if you are interested in operating small to large web applications. Although I have agreed on not disclosing everything I have been shown, I think a few things should be OK … or?

Their main goal seems to be to increase end-to-end transparency and visibility of your web app(s) both on the operating level, ie. where are things going wrong in the software, but also on the business level.

I#ve been shown some large companies, you know them all, and their feedback on their first product mod_top is just impressive.

Now that I have also played around with mod_top a bit I can say that after only running it for about 5min we have already identified and fixed two performance bottle-necks on Cosmotourist!

Keep up the good work and let us know as soon as you have some more tools to play with!

Web 2.0 Expo, presented by O’Reilly, is really keeping me busy these days. Having come to Berlin on Sunday night, the first day was spent having some workshops. Most interesting ones where definitely Cal Henderson’s (Flickr) Scalable Web Architectures and Kathey Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users talk. The presentation and entertainment by Kathy was better though

Today we had several quite interesting sessions. First of all Werner Vogel (CTO Amazon) announcing the availability of Amazon S3 Europe which should have quite a big impact on distributed storage for small to medium companies in Europe. Until now S3 with Amazon’s datacenters in the US was quite useless, due to latency, for us here.

Another interesting session was Google’s Patrick Chanezon presenting OpenSocial to a huge audience here in Berlin. Without having counted everyone, my feeling would be that this talk was one of the best visited ones. Unfortunately the talk didn’t really give any more insight into OpenSocial than what is already publicly known and can be seen in the Google code documentation.

If I find some time tomorrow I’ll try to write up some of the notes I have taken. There are just loads added to my notebook every day