Seeing that Google Maps now allows open collaboration, I’ve started a European Travel Map that allows anyone to add to it.

View Larger Map

Feel free to add in any useful info you can think of:
Hotels to avoid, ones that are good
Memorable restaurants
The best pubs & clubs
Engaging museums or art exhibits

I would envisage that in the future, a collaborative knowledge map could be a great resource when planning a trip away - combining hotel reviews and restaurant recommendations with a visual reference to the city - making it easy to find out what fun things there are to do in the area you’re in.

Salamanca Tapas Restaurant,
St Andrew Street,
Dublin,
Ireland

High quality tapas in a convenient central location

My favourite restaurant in Dublin for several years now has been Salamanca. Being a tapas restaurant, it’s all about sharing and tasting. I normally recommend 2.5 dishes per person if you’re up for a good feed. Again with the whole tasting thing, it’s better with a big group, and you would soon find that 20-25 dishes between 10 people would disappear fast.

Specific dishes that should not be missed are:

• Lamb cutlets - don’t bother with a knife and fork, let your caveman instinct come out and eat with your hands!
• Asparagus with serrano ham - tender asparagus, brimming with flavour
• Deep-fried goats cheese with salsa - I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like this dish!
• Pollo al ajillo - chicken in a creamy garlicky sauce - yummy!

Save some room for dessert if you can - the profiteroles and the creme brulee come highly recommended!

Rated 5/5 on Jul 16 2007 by Elly Parker

LouderVoice Review Tags: restaurant, tapas

Vote on this review or write your own at LouderVoice

Hopefully you’ve all been following the girls over on beaut.ie as they were sending themselves and those closest to them for colonic hydrotherapy and reporting back on this mysterious procedure. I happened to mention to them that I had been thinking about going for a colonic or three and they kindly offered me a session that had been donated to them.

I’ve written a post which they’ve put up today, a no-holds barred ‘truth about colonics’ which you can read over here.

This post talks a lot about Twitter - If you haven’t heard about the ‘latest internet phenomenon’ then click here to read a good definition.

For those who don’t like clicking links, Twitter is a new web service that is like mini-blogging - it allows you to post a short message of up to 140 characters to a webpage and then automatically sends this to people that have chosen to ‘follow’ your life. The updates can be sent via IM, web or to your mobile phone.

It’s interesting seeing excerpts from people’s lives, whether they are simply feeding the kids, saying that they are not feeling well or announcing good news in their lives. I haven’t yet seen anyone posting from the bathroom or announcing their illness (even if Robert Scoble did use it to announce his wife’s pregnancy!), but when big news breaks, it’s twittered very quickly!

In the same way as blogs, we have to ask the question, just how much of our lives should we share online? Do we really want to know when someone is breast-feeding the baby or going for a dump?

I’ve caught myself several times over the past few weeks about to ‘twitter’ something that I probably shouldn’t -mostly when angered by co-workers or enamoured with my fiancé…

Blogging takes longer and most people usually re-read their posts before hitting ‘publish’, but with twittering it’s much easier and faster… and like everything on the internet it’s all archived for posterity. I wonder how many people will twitter something ‘in anger’ and later regret it?

Now that the secret of the Pecha Kucha session is out in the wild (or ‘Pikachu’ as Laura kept referring to it!), I thought I’d post up a few notes and links to the sites I talked about. Everyone else that spoke used del.icio.us for their links, and although I tried using it at one point; I much preferred the Google Bookmark interface. For all the del.icio.us users, it was as simple as sticking their userID into a lovely interface website, or a random userID instead as the hilarious Will was coerced into doing! I wanted to speak to a few sites, so I loaded up about 18 tabs on my browser and gave a high-speed explanation of each (and hopefully i didn’t run too far over time…). I haven’t seen any video of this session yet, so here’s a run-down of some of the sites I recommended that day…
Google Reader

When it comes to RSS, I used to be a NewsGator aficionado, but it really started wigging me out last year - I would keep marking posts as read and the page would refresh and they would still be there, mixed in with the new ones. I decided to make the switch to Google Reader based on recommendations made in several blogs that I read. It couldn’t have been easier, I was given full instructions in how to extract my feeds as a list and imported them into Google Reader - 5 mins later I was up and running. As we often hear from Scoble, you soon get used to pressing ‘J’ to move to the next item and ‘K’ to move back to the previous (and ‘R’ is refresh!). I can scan through my feeds much quicker and it’s a lovely clean interface to boot.

Page2RSS

Continuing on the RSS theme, while Google Reader is excellent at finding any feed available on a webpage, it’s of no use if there is no feed available. That’s where Page2RSS comes in - it will monitor any page for updates and then deliver them direct to your RSS reader. Furthermore, if you use Firefox, then you can create a toolbar button to make it into a one-click process (well, one click to create the RSS feed and another to add it to Google Reader in my case!). Recently it came in useful for me to track the changes to the BarCamp SouthEast wiki.

VideoJug

I posted a review of VideoJug previously, and i have to say that my opinion hasn’t really changed. I still mainly use the site to find recipes, and I’m often to be found in the kitchen with the laptop wirelessly connected as I review a video ‘one last time’ before beginning to cook! The recipes are mainly simple and rarely use hard-to-find ingredients, so they’re perfect for store-cupboard cooking (as I like to refer to the night before I go shopping!). My favourite recipe so far? Has to be Pan-Fried Tuna!

Box.net

I’ve been trying to get all my information online this year, so that I can access it from any computer - I ended up with half my information on my work laptop and the rest on the main PC at home. I was looking for an online document storage and collaboration solution, and while Google Docs and Spreadsheets is good for basic Word and Excel documents it doesn’t cover my needs regarding PDF’s, JPG’s, PowerPoint, etc… Box.net doesn’t give me in-line editing and collaboration, but it does allow me to store my life online and access it from anywhere, so it’s half the battle won! and not to mention that you can have up to 1GB of storage for free…
BookMooch

BookMooch has to be one of my all time favourite sites. I’m an avid reader and I can’t afford to support my book habit, so secondhand shops and Amazon used to feed it slightly cheaper instead! But BookMooch allows you to trade your old books and request other people’s second hand ones in exchange for points. Points are gained for listing books, sending them to other people and leaving feedback amongst other things. You can then spend these points on requesting books that you desire from other members - the only thing it ever costs you is the postage of sending your books out. I worked out how much I had ’spent’ on books from there recently and it worked out that for every book I was receiving, it was costing me about €3.00 - not bad!
Beaut.ie

If you haven’t discovered the delicious mix of wisdom and wit that’s being dispensed on the subject of beauty by the two beautiful babes of beaut.ie then you need to head over there quickly! Sisters Aphrodite and Kirstie along with their ever-growing band of guest writers post about everything beauty related and answer their readers questions whilst questing for the next great beauty bargain. They’ve burst onto the Irish blog scene in a big way over the last few months and have even managed to persuade two of their readers to go test-drive a colonic hydrotherapy procedure! Rumours abound that I may be doing a guest post or two for them in the near future…
Google Customised HomePage

Finally, I left the longest for last: A lot of people don’t realise that if you have a Google Account, then you can customise your Google homepage with lots of cool widgets - as you can see below, on mine I currently have a ton of stuff that I access frequently:

Sticky Note - I’m a list maker, that’s for sure. I can’t start work on anything until I’ve made a list of what needs to be done. Unfortunately, lists end up everywhere, so using Sticky Note means that i can access my personal to-do list from anywhere.

To-Do List - Used in conjunction with Sticky Note, I use this is to keep longer term tasks handily listed.

Bookmarks - this is just a quick link into my Google Bookmarks, after all this time I’m finally trying to pare down my 700+ favourites that I’ve been carrying around for years and make them accessible online.

TinyURL Creator - if you haven’t found TinyURL yet, then head over there and watch them work their magic!

Toggle Search Bar - Handy widget that toggles the main Google search bar on and off at the top of the page - usually toggled to ‘off’ on my page, as I use the built-in Google search in Firefox.

Google Analytics - Handy little snapshot that lets me see ‘at-a-glance’ my Google Analytics stats for the day so far.

Dictionary.com - A nice little widget allowing you to query a word on the dictionary.com site.

Currency Converter - Living in Ireland as I do, I regularly shop on the internet and buy things from around the world - this is how I check that they really are cheaper, that I’m not just imagining it!

The Google 15 - there is a myth that most new Google employees put on at least 15lb in weight over their first year, due to all the free food and drinks that they get at work. I don’t work there, but I’ve certainly put on my own version of that weight over the past 2 years! This widget tracks your weight on a daily basis, showing you a running average and your goal weight.

Google Calculator - I was never able to convert from oz to g, km to miles or any American weight measure to any UK weight measure - this does it for me!

Google Docs & Spreadsheets - Displays any documents I have stored in Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Date & Time - that has to be self-explanatory, surely?

ColorJunction & Geography Zone - a couple of little game widgets for when I have a sec to spare! and finally…

Weather - I like to track weather in several cities at a time, especially since I work as part of a virtual team - it’s always nice to be able to chat to someone without first having to ask, “So what’s the weather like there today?” - it’s much more interesting to be able to say “Ooohhh, I see you’re having a heat-wave at the moment, wish I was there!”

If you don’t like to have things as cluttered as I do, you can create multiple tabs on your homepage and store things as you please.

That’s the end of my review of my ‘can’t live without’ websites from last year - so let me know -

I have some French friends of friends coming over to Dublin for a 2 week English placement tomorrow. They’ve asked me to take them out on Saturday night to give them a flavour of Dublin nightlife, which should be easy enough - a few traditional pubs, then onto Temple Bar for the wilder side.

Then on Sunday they want me to take them on a tour of the city. Now some things are fairly obvious, like pointing out the Spire, the Liffey, Ha’penny Bridge and the tour of the Guinness Brewery (is it open on Sunday?), but after that I’m not so sure.

So here’s a question for you - if you only had 8 hours to show someone the ‘Best of Dublin’ - where would you take them?

One of the reasons that I hadn’t blogged over the past few weeks (apart from being sick) was that I had got bogged down and behind in all my surfing. I read a ton of blogs and news sites via NewsGator every day and if I don’t make time every day I soon fall behind and other things get dropped.

I finally got caught up over last weekend (even with my mum dropping in unexpectedly!), the other main reason for this was the death of our lovely Media Centre… We had been expecting it for a while now and had put off the planned rebuild for far too long - culminating in it bluescreening about 8 times in 4 hours on Saturday. George formatted the C: drive on Sunday, but the fresh install just refused to take… so we’re stuck with only normal TV at the moment and no way to access all our previous recordings… Luckily we both have laptops, otherwise I’d be suffering serious internet withdrawal at this point (my previous record for managing to not check my mail stands at 48 hours!).

The old PC was a testament to George’s excellent PC building skills, he had upgraded components as we went along and with a new motherboard it’s going to make a good server for us for a long time yet. The one thing I won’t miss about it is the noise it generated - ever since the power supply fan had been replaced it was really noisy! But we’re about to order ourselves a lovely new quiet Media Centre, under heavy consideration is a highly customised Shuttle 2000M - packed with an Intel Core Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, 300GB hard drive and a dinky ejectable USB 80GB external Hard Disk Drive!

Anyway, the point of this post was to explain why the internet pleases me once again, not to ramble on about our PC troubles!! This week I found two wonderful new websites that have restored my faith in the internet and made me want to blog again!

Firstly, VideoJug - the site that titles itself “Life Explained. On Film”. It’s a brilliantly simple concept, lots of short videos explaining everything about life and breaking it up into easy-to-follow steps. They have a huge collection of recipes, but a quick look at their most popular videos of the last hour gives an idea of just how vast and far-reaching their content is:

And don’t worry if the video you require is missing - they’re constantly making new videos and the site is crammed with links asking you to suggest what new videos you want. Below each of the recipe videos is a list of the ingredients required and an option to shift between metric and imperial measurements. It gets even better if you own an iPOD or PSP, as all the videos are available for download in those formats, perfect if you don’t have a wireless connection in the kitchen!

The second site was one that was only launched yesterday, but it’s going to revolutionise how we search for lots of products. If you haven’t heard about like.com and checked it out yet, then go do it now. Seriously, I’ll wait…

If you’re a guy in a relationship, you’re probably crapping your pants right now. If not, you should be! My first look at this site lasted for over 20 mins as I clicked around and realised the potential. I need to replace my favourite brown suede boots - mega comfortable, low stacked heel, just under knee high. I entered my search and all the results are returned as pictures, allowing me to instantly see if it fits my criteria or not. I can then select a portion of the picture and refine my search based on that, telling it how much weighting to put on colour or shape by clicking on simple Web 2.0 style buttons. I can filter my results based on colour, price and brand. You can even browse through pictures of various A-list celebrities and click on their shoes and accessories to find similar ones. I’m going to end up spending sooooo much money here! (P.S. - there’s free shopping for the first 10,000 customers!)